Confusion reigns at the Telegraph,
where resident serial fraud Christopher Booker has now decided, after telling
readers that it would not happen because of the hated EU, that the rivers
Parrett and Tone, which drain the Somerset Levels, will
be dredged and de-silted anyway. This, he has announced, is down to
Environment Secretary Owen Paterson’s stance alone.
Flooding on the Somerset Levels
That’s an interesting idea for him to try and sell, given
that he has previously told that various
EU directives, plus the behaviour
of the previous Government, had forced the Levels to become a disaster
waiting to happen – and that there was nothing that anyone could do about it,
short – of course – of leaving the EU. So now the headline is “Owen Paterson puts ‘dry homes’ before greens’
‘wet lands’”.
Two weeks ago the
story was that “they were
deliberately engineered by Labour ministers in 2009, regardless of the property
and human rights of the thousands of people whose homes and livelihoods would
be affected [and the] Met Office
forecast in November led the Environment Agency to take a step that has made
the flooding infinitely more disastrous than it need have been”.
This was, not surprisingly, another pack of lies, but as
Booker knows only too well, if you’re going to tell whoppers, you might as well
do it properly. Both the Parrett and Tone – contrary to what several
right-leaning pundits have asserted – had their “pinch points” de-silted
in October and November last year,
to increase their flow rate. And, as Paterson’s action shows, the EU isn’t
forcing us to do anything.
On top of that, only
last week he was claiming “An
alliance of the Somerset county council, the Environment Agency and green
lobbyists, all of whom have received millions of pounds in funding from
Brussels to shape and implement EU policy, looks ominously like winning the day
... any hope of reversing that policy and preventing a repetition of this
disaster begins to look pretty forlorn”.
And Booker cannot resist telling another whopper when it
comes to the exceptionally wet winter just past: “what turned out to be only England’s 16th wettest winter in 250 years”.
As the
Met Office has confirmed, “It has ...
been the wettest winter in the long running England and Wales precipitation
series going back to 1766”. That’s as near 250 years as makes no
difference.
The Somerset Levels flooded when that annual dredging that
Booker believes to be a catch-all solution was in place. And the flooding
reached a lot further – the 65 square kilometres of last winter was dwarfed by
the 280 square kilometres in 1919. The Environment Agency has never, but never,
prioritised wildlife over the safety of humans. But sometimes the sheer volume
of water defeats the best preparations.
And there is no way
for him to lie his way out of that inconvenient fact.
And the Booker prize for fiction this year goes to ..............
ReplyDeleteCould rearrange those words but there is a helluva lot of competition from the Daily Mail this year (and we're only two months in).