Something goes wrong and what a surprise, the politicians are looking to blame or avoid blame. In this case the popular newspapers have successfully deflected blame over the Somerset floods away from the people more obviously responsible - those who run DEFRA and those who set their budgets, ie the quad, and instead towards the Environment Agency and Chris Smith, who happens to be a member of the Labour party. An obvious target then. It is said that the EA should have dredged the rivers in Somerset and if they had done so the floods would not have happened. If that is true for the sake of argument, then surely the fault for the lack of action is the cuts in DEFRA which means it cannot fulfil what it should be doing. It could have prioritised Somerset, but on a limited budget that would have put other parts of the country at risk. How can anyone know in advance where the next extreme weather event will take place? Alternatively it may well be that given the quantity of rainfall, dredging the rivers would not have made much difference. The bigger fundamental issue here is that the government is not doing nearly enough to tackle global warming. This is true globally as well as nationally. The government may argue it is doing some things, and clearly it is. But actually it is not doing nearly enough. Owen Patterson said recently that climate change in the short term will improve the climate for agriculture. This of course is the direction of travel for the Tory party, to be half hearted or in some cases sceptical. With that kind of leadership, no wonder not enough is being done. But there is also a problem with public opinion. I think the BBC could say a lot more about climate change. As well as asking Joe Public about Chris Smith, why not also climate change and Owen Patterson?
Posted on: Sun, 09 Feb 2014 21:48:27 +0000
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