They live in Somerset, England, and have been doing this since Christmas and are just one example of hundreds who are angry at the gross incompetence of officials who would prioritise birds and wildlife over farmers and agriculture.
People on the Somerset Levels, a vast area of fertile reclaimed farmland, have been successfully managing floods since the 13th century. But once the last socialist government got it hands on the Environmental Agency, they stopped dredging the rivers, choosing instead to spend £20 million on a coastal nature sanctuary and running programmes to encourage farmers to flood their land in order to promote birdlife. As a result of these policies, the tidal Rivers Tone and Parrett are so clogged up with silt they are wholly incapable of handling the level of rainfall experienced over the last few weeks, so now locals have to be ferried over flooded land to get their basic supplies. More rain last night has meant villages have to evacuate altogether , leaving their properties at risk to thieves, who are helping themselves to farmer’s fuel, tools and whatever else they can get their hands on.
Meanwhile we have had a plethora of politicians on our TV screens, puffed up like angry budgerigars telling us something has to be done. Ya think? It doesn’t matter whether they are on the left or right, our system of land management by government has become so unfit for purpose all they can do now is throw promises of money at a situation when disaster strikes, as our Illustrious leader David (just call me Dave) Cameron has done –offering £100m over the next year to deal with flooding issues. Clear as the mud and sewage people are struggling in.
Tony Blair shook this country to the core with reforms
In the days before Tony Blair shook this country to the core with reforms, flood risk management and assets were controlled by local authorities via flood defence committees. In other words the people that knew the area and how to manage it ran it and were reimbursed by the government when needed. Then the leftists jumped in, rearranged the way floods were strategically handled via the Environmental agency – a body funded by the leftist created Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), making local handling more bureaucratic and less efficient. Couple this with putting people in charge who go weak at the knees anytime they hear the word “biodiversity” and you begin to see why the Environment Agency which has a budget of £1.2billion and 11,400 strong staff will provide only £350,000 of the £4million required to get those Somerset rivers dredged. People like ex-Environment Agency boss Baroness Young who clearly preferred swampland to farmland, and who was aided and abetted by Natural England and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, interestingly an organisation of which she was a former chief executive. This is all until Dave stepped in with extra money that no one knows where it will come from or who exactly is going to get it.
Perhaps Prince Charles could lend a helping hand by giving Dave a few hints in one of his now famous strongly worded letters. Charles visited some of the worst affected areas to talk to locals and get to grips with the real issues. I am no big fan of Charles, but when local people living in hell are being told by the World Wildlife Fund that planting trees is the answer to flood management, maybe a chat with Charles, himself a farmer, was just the thing they needed. The Somerset County Council has a budget of £300million and is in deficit to the tune £106million. They can’t come up with £4million to dredge the rivers but they can, however, find money for health and well being programs aimed at getting young and old people to learn how to garden together, with further programs that teach them how to cook together. After lunch they can go for walks with a health walk co-ordinator. Call me old fashioned, but I used to do that sort of thing with my grandfather without 55 councillors given £5000 each to spend on contriving this rubbish in association with volunteers to put together these programs. Maybe a letter writing royal personage is the only way to go in this madness of misspent money.
Locals put Charles on a wooden garden seat decorated in white roses, tied onto a tractor and drove him around the farms. It looked positively medieval, but as this point if giving the prince a nice ride delivers a good letter to Dave, maybe he will listen. That is, after all, in this day and age, the point of monarchy – to observe and advise and hold the country together symbolically when it’s falling apart.
Country’s infrastructure is collapsing under the strain of gross incompetence
The situation is so bad even the leftist environmentalists don’t know what to say anymore. Eventually they will no doubt cobble together some convoluted explanation of climate change, but in the meantime, the country’s infrastructure is collapsing under the strain of gross incompetence and even they know it.
Stream and forest management on higher grounds have been mismanaged to the point that rivers have been cleared of wood and debris which normally diverts water to these uplands halting or slowing water flow to villages and towns below. This point was picked up on by George Monbiot, a true believer of global warming and writer of the left. In an article published by the Daily Mail he explained that EU subsidies are given to farmers who keep animals on poor uplands on the condition that they clear that land of trees and scrub that would naturally absorb the water. He also contends that sheep compact the soil so the water runoff rates are vastly increased causing flooding in the lower lying Levels. But he stops there and goes on to blame rich landowners taking in subsidies and clearing the land and lambasts the Environment Agency for even considering dredging the rivers when re-wilding is the way to go. Yet locals living off the land are crying out for river dredging.
Maybe if rich landowners were let off extortionate inheritance tax they wouldn’t be so desperate to take any subsides they can get, arrange lucrative corporate grouse shoots or sell pretty teacups in their estate shops, they would have more money to manage the land as they had done successfully for hundreds of years before the Labour government decided they were a class to be abolished in the '60s and '70s through heavy taxation. Just a thought.
Meanwhile, more storms are forecast. Coastal railways are in tatters and those further inland are waterlogged. Business is grinding to a halt and companies have already lost about £100million in the Somerset Levels alone. Water sewage systems are backing up and flowing into town streets despite us paying more and more in water tax that is supposed to manage the sewers. Let’s return control of the environment to the locals and away from central state planning. And let’s do it before life in Somerset returns to the 13th century.
