Under the Weather

"We must be better prepared", declared our hapless Prime Minister as he visited a storm-struck part of Kent last week.  "These things are happening more frequently."  Hmm, I wonder why that might be, Dave?  Could it have anything to do with climate change (which various prominent members of your party deny is happening)?  And could that climate change be, at least in part, the result of human activity?  In which case, if you really want to do something about these all too frequent extremes of weather which keep disrupting the UK, why, Dave, are you telling your lackeys to "get rid of all the green crap" with regard to energy?  Because, in reality, the only long-term response we have to these weather changes, which has any chance of being effective, lies in tackling climate change: all that "green crap".  Otherwise, I really don't know what he expects people to do in order to be "more prepared".  Should everyone be made to have an inflatable dinghy in case of floods?  The fact is that you can be as 'prepared' as you like, but the reality is that there is nothing any of us can do to actually stop the storms which do the damage.  Weather doesn't respond to threats or government edicts.  That said, I'd love to have seen Dave standing on a South Coast beach last Monday, arms held high trying to order the  storm raging around him to go back out to sea, King Canute style.

But a lot of his wittering at last week's ill-judged photo-opportunity focused on the supposed failures of the power companies and insurers to respond in a timely fashion.  However, as all of these nowadays lie in the private sector, like the weather, they are not directly accountable to the government.  Situations like last week's storms highlight one of the many problems which result from the privatisation of public utilities: profit comes before customer service.  From their point of view, having lots of emergency equipment and engineers on stand-by awaiting a major outage simply isn't cost-effective - so their response teams are pared to the bone.  Which, of course, means that when you have a major incident like last week's storms, they simply don't have the resources to adequately respond.  To be honest, they can't seem to adequately respond during normal conditions, as I can attest from my personal experience of having been without electricity for twenty hours once after a problem with my local substation.  The excuse was that the specialists they needed were on another job somewhere else - you'd hope they'd have more than one team to cover a large chunk of the UK, although I suspect the power company's reluctance to pay overtime had something to do with it.  But that, along with more and worse bad weather, is the face of the future under this government: more privatisation, less environmental protection.  So there you go, I hold Cameron entirely responsible for the state of my roof after it was hit by the storms last week.  The bastard.