Skip to main content

Scapegoats are not solutions

If the government took flooding seriously it would not be slashing funds and jobs at the Environment Agency

COMMUNITIES Secretary Eric Pickles has taken the vogue for unapologetic apologies to a new nadir in his supposed admission of guilt for the government’s response to the current flooding crisis.

Pickles owned up to the conservative coalition’s “mistake” of relying on Environment Agency experts who were not dredging the rivers into which the Somerset Levels drain.

He had nothing to say about government-imposed cuts in staffing and spending for the agency as if this had no impact on its ability to cope with weather emergencies.

Most crucial of all is his failure to recognise the utterly inadequate official response over decades to the issue of climate change, with too many people in authority persisting in viewing it as merely one theory among others to explain meteorological phenomena.

Stand-in environment minister Pickles says that the cash-strapped Environment Agency should have spent millions to dredge the rivers Parrett and Tone, but this would not have prevented flooding.

The level of rainfall that has cascaded onto the Mendips, Quantocks and other hills in the area has been exceptional and could not have been contained by the river network.

Flooding is not an aberration for the Somerset Levels. It is the natural scheme of things. It is a flood plain.

The prevalence of the Anglo-Saxon suffix “-ney” on local settlements indicates “islands” among the swamps that were drained for use as farmland, but drainage does not prevent flooding.

Nor does dredging, especially in an area where the level of much of the land is below that of the rivers.

Pickles’s populist espousal of the dredging demand made by thuggish oaf and local Tory MP Ian Liddell-Granger owes more to political motives than a genuine belief that it will improve matters for the people driven from their homes by rising water levels.

Liddell-Granger’s demand for state aid is hypocritical given his support for the coalition’s vicious public spending cuts.

His personalised abuse of Environment Agency chairman Chris Smith, calling him a “git” and a “coward” and threatening to “stick his head down the loo,” exposes his motivation as the search for a scapegoat rather than a long-term solution.

Dredging the rivers will speed up their flow, carrying greater volumes of water and making floods more likely downstream.

Faster flow also tends to increase erosion of the banks, thereby promoting a build-up of silt, making floods more likely and sparking the same sterile circular debate over how best to manage heavy rainfall over a flood plain.

Environmental campaigner George Monbiot revealed recently the data from a major research programme, showing that water sinks into soil under trees at 67 times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under grass.

He pointed out the results of an experiment at Pontbren, near Llanfair Caereinion in Powys, where local hill farmers, in concert with the Woodland Trust, have taken a more imaginative and less technologically driven approach over the past dozen years.

Planting trees and shrubs, creating ponds and restoring hedges are at variance with government orthodoxy and the grants regime of the European Union, but these measures have substantially reduced water run-off and had a positive effect on their sheep-raising businesses.

Instead of proposing a solution designed to deliver dividends at next year’s general election, politicians should accept that flooding will occur more often because of global warming.

They should work with nature to mitigate its effects rather than seek self-defeating short-term fixes.

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 12,411
We need:£ 5,589
5 Days remaining
Donate today