Taking on Water

I really am losing track of which day it is - despite having established that yesterday was definitely Sunday, I still spent a large part of today thinking that it was Tuesday.  But it wasn't.  Today is Monday.  Perhaps part of the trouble has been the fact that nothing seems to have changed from day-to-day.  Even the news seems to have stayed the same: floods in the North.  Whilst I sympathise with those affected, (my sodden kitchen earlier this year, the result of the hot water cylinder springing a leak, whilst minor in comparison, was dispiriting and disruptive enough to make me appreciate how much worse it must be when it is your entire house affected), the majority of the reporting - especially on TV - never actually gets to the real story, focusing, instead, on the effects of the flooding.  That story, of course, is of the political decisions which have lead to Britain's flood defences proving to be utterly inadequate.  Oh, I know that everyone keeps going on about how this flooding is 'unprecedented' the 'worst on record' and 'couldn't be predicted', but that's just nonsense.  Have people really forgotten how large parts of Somerset were submerged only a couple of winters ago?  Or the severe floods of a few years before that?  The fact is that these weather patterns are becoming ever more frequent, yet still we seem utterly unprepared for them.

But the media these days seem to be so far in hock to the Tories that they appear frightened to point out the salient points: whilst the last Labour government increased spending on flood defences by 75%, the Tory-led coalition government cut spending on them, in line with its other cuts in public expenditure.  This, despite the pig fucker's, sorry, Cameron's, promises when he was standing in his wellies with the cameras on him at one of the affected areas last time (and the time before) that his government was going to bolster those flood defences to stop it from happening again.  Yet more broken Tory spending promises, the media should be screaming.  But, of course, they aren't.  Instead they are, yet again, letting the Tory bastards off of the hook.  Just as they will again next Winter, or the Winter after, or whenever we next get these kinds of floods and the defences prove inadequate.  Because if they were to challenge the Tories' record on this issue, they'd be ideologically 'off message' by suggesting that in some areas public spending is essential - trust me, the private sector isn't going to build effective flood defences for our homes: there's no money in it for them.  And if public is better in one are, then it follows that it might well be in others, too.  The fact is that the deplorable state of the nation's flood defences has provided a spectacular - and for those on the receiving end, traumatic and expensive - demonstration of the results of the Tories' policy of treating public spending primarily as a means for its private sector buddies to make a quick buck without offering any real service in return.  But you won't hear any of that on the BBC or read it in most of the papers.  So stand by for more floods and ever shittier public services all round.  Happy New Year.