(I know it is not considered good form to name and shame supposedly neutral government information officers, but unless journalists start doing it, we will have the taxpayer funding what is in effect a Whitehall-based propaganda agency for the Tory party.)įlood debris is moved off the road in Keswick after December’s floods. He had passed it to one Susannah Lally of the environment department, who, funnily enough, would not answer either. When it came, Stuart Burgess of the Forestry Commission’s reply was that he refused to answer my question. They took until Friday – that is three months – to answer my question. Even by the abysmal standards of Whitehall information officers, their response was shocking. I contacted the Forestry Commission press office on 7 December 2015 to ask what happened to its flood-prevention plan. The commission was offering a reformist alternative to Monbiot’s revolutionary transformation a Menshevik answer to his Bolshevism. It just wanted to plant in the marshy fields between Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, along the Thirlmere and Buttermere valleys and in the vale of Lorton. The Forestry Commission did not propose cloaking in forest the mountains that Wordsworth walked and Wainwright mapped. For although I love the romantic grandeur of Monbiot’s vision, I love the sheep-made fells of the Lake District more. The Forestry Commission was nowhere near as bold and I was glad of that.
Sending forests over hills given over to sheep farming and grouse shooting would allow wildlife to revive, as well as providing protection from floods and contributing, in a small way, to reducing global warming. My Guardian colleague George Monbiot has argued with eloquence that we should “rewild” the uplands. It was a modest proposal in both cost and ambitions. In 2010, the year the Conservatives came to power, the Forestry Commission suggested new woodlands to slow run off from the Cumbrian mountains.
A government that refuses to see the dangers in front of us will not even try to respond. And only its culture of witless mockery and half-educated conspiracy theory could allow David Cameron to make Owen Paterson a “climate sceptic” environment secretary from 2012 to 2014.Ĭameron’s belief that climate change is “green crap” saps the will to fight. This is the sea is which the Conservative party swims. Trudge on and you lose yourself in a wilderness of rightwing make-believe, where every babbling crank is exalted and every honest researcher denounced. But read the Conservative press and you will see a yearning to believe that 97% of qualified scientists have been bribed or intimidated into joining a conspiracy to deceive the public. I accept that it is unusual to find a senior Tory who denies in public that the climate is changing and that human activity is the primary cause. Cameron’s belief that climate change is 'green crap' saps the will to fight
Once they have fought their way past metropolitan complacency, however, they run into the immovable object of a Tory government that does not understand the need for communal effort. We do not experience or fear them.īritain does not lack far-sighted public servants, who want to mitigate today’s threats with the same spirit that brought us the Thames Barrier. Floods are what most metropolitan journalists and senior civil servants see on the news. But the capital sits snug behind the Thames Barrier, one of the most essential and far-sighted public works of the 20th century. If London suffered like this, you would see action. If it comes over the barrier again, she thinks, she will have to find £10,000 before the insurance company will pay her a penny.
Lynne Jones of the Keswick Flooding Action Group told me she would sit at night with a glass of wine and watch the river from her guesthouse window. Everyone is wondering if they can afford gigantic insurance premiums. Everyone is waiting for months for dehumidifiers to dry out their homes. Everyone is chasing the same surveyors and builders. The wreckage is still everywhere: ruined caravans washed downstream and 2-3cms of silt that the flood brought to town.
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