Below is the story behind non-dredging of the Somerset Levels and neglect of the south west of England.
Whilst a permanent programme of continual dredging of Somerset’s waterways would not necessarily have prevented flooding caused by abnormal weather conditions, it is reasonable to conclude that it would have ameliorated the worst effects and actually prevented some of the flooding of houses and farming resources.
The true cost of preventable flooding is likely greatly in excess of the costs of dredging which could have prevented it. Once again we have an example of ‘penny wise but pound foolish’ successive British Governments which, failing to undertake proper cost/benefit analyses, have failed the people of Somerset and the south west of England.
Here is the scenario:
The Second Tier anti-English Scottish mafia includes one Barbara Young, Baroness Young of Old Scone. She was the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency from 2000 to 2008.
Baroness Barbara Young of Old Scone
During April 2008, Baroness Young was appointed by the then Secretary of State for Health in ENGLAND as chair of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) which she was involved in establishing. She held this position until 1 February 2010. (In June 2013, following a series of critical reports and facing 30 civil claims for negligence, it was announced that the organisation would be subjected to a public inquiry. David Prior, then chair of the Commission, admitted that the organisation was “not fit for purpose.”)
Read what Christopher Booker, a kindred anti-EU writer recorded in the Spectator: ” . . . But while this media circus and the growing crisis along the Thames have been occupying the headlines, assiduous researchers have finally been uncovering those ‘smoking guns’ which explain how this disaster has come about. The first was revealed by my long-time collaborator Richard North, a real EU expert who, by combing through scores of official documents, unravelled the story of just how Baroness Young had been able to get her way in shifting her agency’s priorities towards promoting the interests of ‘nature’ over those of farming and people.
A key part in this had been played by those EU directives which govern almost everything the Environment Agency gets up to – including two with which Baroness Young was already familiar when she presided over the RSPB – setting out the EU’s policy on ‘habitats’ and ‘birds’. But just as important was a 2007 directive on the ‘management of flood risks’, which required ‘flood plains’, in the name of ‘biodiversity’, to be made subject to increased flooding.
This was just what Lady Young was looking for. She had already been giving lectures and evidence to a House of Lords committee on the EU’s earlier Water Framework directive, proclaiming that one of her agency’s top priorities should be to create more ‘habitats’ for wildlife by allowing wetlands to revert to nature. As she explained in an interview in 2008, creating new nature reserves can be very expensive. By far the cheapest way was simply to allow nature to take its course, by halting the drainage of wetlands such as the Somerset Levels. The recipe she proudly gave in her lectures, repeated to that Lords committee, was: for ‘instant wildlife, just add water’.
In 2008 her agency therefore produced a 275-page document categorising areas at risk of flooding under six policy options. These ranged from Policy 1, covering areas where flood defences should be improved, down to category 6, where, in the name of ‘frequency of flooding’. The paper placed the Somerset Levels firmly under Policy 6, where the intention was quite deliberately to allow more flooding. The direct consequences of that we are now seeing round the clock on our television screens.”
THE FULL INFORMATIVE ARTICLE CAN BE ACCESSED HERE:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9137131/instant-wildlife-just-add-water/http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9137131/instant-wildlife-just-add-water/
There has accumulated in recent decades a mass of evidence which calls into question both the election and appointment of Scots to position of significance in England, especially in relation to matters devolved to Scotland and Wales but not to a national body for England.
Will no one save us in England from such meddlesome Scots.