What an extraordinarily short-sighted thing to celebrate. Let us take Yorkshire as an example. Along that coastline you have RNLI stations at Redcar, Staithes & Runswick, Whitby, Scarborough, Filey, Flamborough, Bridlington and Withernsea. These are communities with fishing fleets, pleasure craft, beaches, cliffs, harbours and substantial tourism. So let us imagine that the campaign succeeds and, as this post gleefully predicts, the @RNLI is eventually no longer there. What happens next? Do we simply tell the fisherman whose boat has lost power in bad weather that there is no lifeboat? Do we leave the family cut off by the tide? The capsized sailor? The child swept from a beach? The tourist in difficulty off Scarborough? Of course we would not. Somebody would have to replace the service. Perhaps local councils should provide it, with the cost appearing on council tax bills. Perhaps every commercial fisherman should pay a £3,000-a-year lifeboat levy. Perhaps harbour dues should rise substantially. Perhaps coastal businesses that depend upon tourism should pay. Or perhaps central government should create a taxpayer-funded national lifeboat service. Those figures are deliberately hypothetical, but the underlying point is not: there is no magical, cost-free replacement for the RNLI. Today the RNLI operates 238 lifeboat stations and 451 lifeboats and hovercraft, supported by more than 7,900 volunteer lifeboat and shore crew. Less than 1% of its funding comes from government sources. Think about that for a moment. People voluntarily give money, thousands of people voluntarily give their time, and in return Britain and Ireland have an extraordinarily sophisticated lifesaving network around their coasts. And some people apparently think destroying that is a victory because they object to a tiny proportion of its work in the Channel. By all means stop donating if you no longer support the charity. It is your money. But perhaps before celebrating the prospect of the RNLI disappearing, ask who you expect to launch when your son is overdue from a fishing trip, your daughter is swept out to sea, or your family needs help on a day at the coast. Because somebody will still have to pay for that lifeboat. At present, remarkably, most of us do not have to. Other people voluntarily do it for us.