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Tag Archives: flood

Heavy rain expected to increase flood risk – in Newark?

05 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Conservative Party, Corruption, Democracy, Flood Defence, People, Politics, UK

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

blackmail, bribery, by election, candidate, christies, Conservative, constituency, David Cameron, EA, economic threat, electoral fraud, Environment Agency, flood, George Osborne, house, mansion, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, misinformation, newark, people, politics, risk, The Guardian, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, winter


140208floods

According to the Environment Agency, there is a “low but increased risk of flooding this weekend across the whole of England, as isolated torrential downpours are predicted”.

The Environment Agency is monitoring the situation and is also supporting local authorities who will respond to any reports of surface water flooding.

One can’t help but wonder if Newark is among the places threatened. The constituency that is hosting today’s by-election was hit badly by the winter floods that hit between November last year and February, but was sidelined by both politicians and the news media, who preferred sites in Oxfordshire and Somerset that were easy to reach along the M4.

Conservatives have been dangling the promise of extra money for flood defences in front of voters like a carrot for donkeys, according to The Guardian, which said George Osborne told residents: “I can’t make the announcement today, it wouldn’t be proper, but I think people in this community can rest assured that I have seen this for myself, I have listened to the community and we will act.”

The paper added that Southwell locals had indicated David Cameron had also been talking to local people about the flood money bid on Monday.

Will the Tories do anything about it if they lose? Doubtful.

Isn’t that electoral fraud, then? Blackmail, economic threats (flooding has a severe effect on local businesses), bribery… misinformation at the very least?

In that case, never mind their candidate’s undeclared directorship of Christie’s and £1.3 million house.

The Tories deserve to lose because they are trying to bribe the voters.

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Were the winter floods really that bad – or were they a distraction?

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Flood Defence, Housing, Media, People, Politics, Public services, UK, Water

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Coalition, Conservative, cut, David Cameron, distract, Ed Miliband, Environment Agency, Eric Pickles, flood, fund, government, Media, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, money is no object, Owen Paterson, people, politics, storm, Tories, Tory, UK, Vox Political, Wellington boots, winter


Photo opportunity: David Cameron and his posh new Wellies, talking a good fight but putting up less funds than he previously took away.

Photo opportunity: David Cameron and his posh new Wellies, talking a good fight but putting up less funds than he previously took away.

The storm of recriminations over the floods that battered the UK during the last few months appears to have been entirely disproportionate to their effect, if Vox Political‘s moles in the Environment Agency are to be believed.

Consider this: In 2007, the UK was hit by unprecedented flooding that damaged around 55,000 properties. Between December 2013 and February this year, the country was again hit by floods. Total number of properties flooded: around 5,000.

So we’ve had one-eleventh of the damage to homes, and (it seems) 11 times the fuss!

The media frenzy has given us photographs of David Cameron visiting flood-hit areas in his posh new Wellington boots, Ed Miliband being unjustifiably upbraided by a posh-voiced villager in his new Wellington boots, Eric Pickles blaming Owen Paterson, Owen Paterson blaming anyone he can, and everybody blaming the Environment Agency.

This is why Vox Political‘s EA moles are feeling ill-served; they say they have been doing the best they can under extremely difficult conditions – starved of funds, working 60-hour weeks including weekends with no extra pay (of course).

The extra cash provided by Mr “Money Is No Object” Cameron did not even equal the amount he had previously cut from the Environment Agency’s budget, meaning that the organisation was still unable to provide the service it had managed before the Conservative Party took the reigns of government in 2010.

Although funding cuts have been put on hold – for now, the Agency has no reason to believe its budget will not be hit again, as soon as the politicians find it expedient. If that is the case, what do you think will happen when the next flood hits?

This was a disaster that could have been avoided, with better planning and funding. But it wasn’t, and the government publicity machine went into overdrive while it was going on.

So our moles have been left with two questions:

Was this disaster manufactured?

If so, what was the government really doing while everyone was distracted by the constant media coverage of the storms?

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The benefit debate is a diversion – that’s why it will go on and on

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Bedroom Tax, Benefits, Cost of living, council tax, Democracy, Disability, Economy, Employment, Employment and Support Allowance, Housing, Media, pensions, People, Politics, Poverty, Public services, tax credits, UK, unemployment, Universal Credit

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

allowance, banker, benefits street, blame, boss, build, Channel 4, Conservative, crisis, David Cameron, debate, dodge, economic, economy, Eton, flood, house, housing benefit, industrial, industry, job, jobless, jobseeker, low, Owen Jones, pay, private landlord, relief, rent, rip-off, strategy, subsidise, system, tax, tax haven, Tories, Tory, workless


140218benefitstreet

How many of you tuned into the last episode of Benefits Street on Channel 4, and stayed on for the debate that followed?

Quite a few, I reckon.

They were worth watching, but the feeling that was left with this viewer (and I’ve been reviewing television for 20 years or more) is that we are talking ourselves around in circles – led by politicians with a vested interest in perpetuating the discussion.

They don’t want a solution. They want us to keep going over the same ground – which they have laid out for us with very specific limits – and they want to concentrate our anger about this issue so that we blame, not the people responsible – the tax dodgers who put money into tax havens that could be invested in British industry, the private landlords and low-paying bosses who are subsidised by the benefit system and the bankers who caused the economic crisis a few years ago – but the people who have been forced onto benefits through no fault of their own and are being persecuted for it by a punitive system that penalises them for failing to find jobs that really do not exist.

Look at the way David Cameron leapt forward with fistfuls of cash to pay for flood relief when Tory heartlands were affected, saying that money was no object and Britain is a rich country. We’re rich enough to look after the playing fields of Eton, but not our poorest citizens, according to his mentality. Property is worth more to him than people.

Why? Because the people who send their children to Eton are the people Cameron hopes will elect him (he can’t be re-elected; he didn’t win the 2010 election) in 2015. The unemployed are less likely to vote for him – in fact they are less likely to vote at all. It seems there is something about being rejected by society that instils a sense of listlessness and despair in the human psyche. People ask themselves: Why bother?

There are solutions, but it is cause for concern that we are not hearing about them from our MPs and politicians. Journalist Owen Jones came out with the clearest plan during the debate on Channel 4 last night, and it is well worth quoting in full.

He said: “Firstly let’s make it clear – work does not pay in this country. We hear that as a mantra, when most people in poverty get up in the morning and earn that poverty.

“We’re talking about people milking the system. Let’s talk about the low-paying bosses who are being subsidised with in-work benefits because, in the seventh-richest country on Earth, they won’t pay.

“If we’re talking about getting people into jobs I actually think we need to talk about solutions here. One in six workers in the last two years have claimed Jobseekers’ Allowance at some point; that’s a lack of security.

“What we need firstly is a massive house-building programme that would reduce the amount spent on Housing Benefit which, by the way, is not going into the pockets of these tenants – it’s lining the pockets of private landlords charging rip-off rents. If we build housing, it would create jobs and we would stimulate the economy as well.

“It goes the same with the need for an industrial strategy because what successive governments have done, and it started in the eighties, is let the secure jobs go to rot, if you like. Now, other countries like Germany, what they’ve done is had an industrial strategy. Instead of saying, ‘Hands off, let the market decide,’ they’ve said, ‘Actually we want to create jobs in renewable energy.’ Now we’ve just seen the floods; we’re going to have a lot more extreme weather, so let’s have an industrial strategy to go and create renewable energy jobs, giving people secure, dignified jobs, taking on the environmental crisis.

“These are solutions… We’ve got to change the debate we have at the moment where the real villains of the piece, like the tax dodgers who get away with not paying £25 billion a year in tax, like the private landlords and the low-paying bosses milking our welfare state, like the bankers who caused the economic disaster – they get away with it, but all we ever hear about is kicking people at the bottom.”

Absolutely right. And that’s all we’ll hear about it for the foreseeable future, as well. We won’t hear about returning to a full-employment society (which is perfectly possible), because that means the greedy rich will have less money for themselves in the short term.

In the long term, ensuring that there are properly-paid jobs for the most people, so they do not have to claim benefits, means that there is more money moving around the economy – and money makes money. The parasites – who are making a fortune unsustainably by working people hard and paying them poverty rations – would be just as rich in the long run, but they cannot bear to consider the possibility.

One has to consider whether they want to force people into poverty, just to make their own wealth seem more remarkable – the poverty trap as ego-trip, if you like.

But we won’t hear about that because it is politically inflammatory. Far better to set the lower classes against each other, laying blame on each other for problems that are caused by different people entirely – and laugh all the way to the offshore bank.

If I had to describe Britain to a foreigner, I would ask them to imagine a person being robbed outside a public lavatory, by the mayor of his town, while council workers started demolishing the building; the rich are destroying our public services and mugging us at the same time.

Very soon, the same people who are mugging you will be asking for your vote…

… while blaming you for problems they have done nothing to solve.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Flooding: Why is the taxpayer picking up the tab? There’s an EU fund!

14 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Conservative Party, European Union, Flood Defence, Health, People, Politics, Public services, UK

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

BBC, Cornwall, David Cameron, Environment Agency, Eric Pickles, EU, european union, flood, fund, government, handout, Kenneth Clarke, Kent, Levels, lynch mob, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Owen Paterson, Oxfordshire, people, politics, Prince Charles, Question Time, Reading, Somerset, Surrey, taxpayer, Vox Political, Windsor


The Conservative response: David Cameron swans around the Somerset Levels in his wellies while local MP Ian Liddell-Grainger (second from left) tries to get a word in edgeways.

The Conservative response: David Cameron swans around the Somerset Levels in his wellies while local MP Ian Liddell-Grainger (second from left) tries to get a word in edgeways.

It seems that David ‘Money Is No Object’ Cameron is unnecessarily forcing British taxpayers to fork out for flood relief while European officials scratch their heads and wonder why he isn’t taking advantage of a huge EU fund that is available to us.

We should all know why the comedy Prime Minister is avoiding Europe – he doesn’t want to lose face.

Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party across the UK criticise our membership because we pay so much in and take so little out (in their perception); this argument would be defeated if Cameron actually used the fund in the manner for which it was created and he would then lose support from members of his Parliamentary party.

Also, at a time when the UK’s future in Europe is being questioned, it would be “politically sensitive” (as Reuters describes it) for Cameron to go there and ask for a handout.

But governments are judged on the way they deal with crises (as the Political Rant blog put it) – and this one has put Cameron, figuratively as well as literally, between the rock and the river.

According to Reuters: “Asked whether Britain would ask for EU money, Cameron’s official spokesman told reporters on Wednesday the government was looking at every source of possible funding, playing down the idea that there was anything political behind it.

“Under EU rules, a country has 10 weeks from the first damage caused by a natural disaster to request aid.

“A person close to Cameron said there were technical grounds to do with spending thresholds that determined when to apply for a grant. Britain had no desire to get into a war of words with Brussels on the matter, he said.”

The news agency added that the government had deployed the armed forces to evacuate residents and shore up river defences, while under fire from critics for what ministers have acknowledged was a slow initial response.

Political Rant is less diplomatic (as you might expect): “Ken Clarke said it was just a normal winter and people complaining about flood defences were just a ‘lynch mob’. Eric Pickles criticised the Environment Agency while the Environment Agency criticised government cuts and Owen Paterson criticised Eric Pickles.

“David Cameron has undertaken several jaunts in his nice clean wellies, first to Kent just after Christmas where he was harangued by people left waist-deep in water without power for a week, then Somerset which he only visited after Prince Charles had been the day before, making it look rather silly the Prime Minister hadn’t bothered, and … to Cornwall where, a friend tells me, Railtrack diverted engineers who were supposed to be fixing the washed-out rail line at Dawlish to shake hands with the PM at a rail depot.

“The same PM has talked sadly about how a power cut interrupted his viewing of The Sound of Music on New Year’s Day while staying silent about two SSE engineers who said they were diverted from reinstating the power for 11,000 people to locate his trip switch.

“When the floods recede, we are more than likely to find a few people who died.”

Yes, and they’ll be in rural areas because the increased funds Cameron has announced amount only to a slightly smaller cut than he had originally intended, and the funding formula for flood defences demands £8 of economic benefit for every £1 spent – meaning a concentration on densely-populated urban areas.

Add to that the fact that Cameron only bothered to act when Conservative-voting areas were affected – the Somerset Levels, Windsor, Reading, Oxdfordshire, Surrey, Kent – and couldn’t care less when the waters were hitting places like Scunthorpe (as revealed on the BBC’s Question Time yesterday) and Cameron has put himself in a serious political mire.

He has made it clear that his is a government that only looks after its own supporters.

Everyone else can drown.

We won’t forget that.

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The Coalition is creating serious problems and distracting you with phantoms

24 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Benefits, Employment, Immigration, unemployment

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Annual Survey, ASHE, Bank of England, BBC News, beauty, bedroom tax, benefit, benefit cap, BoE, breasts, bribe, Bulgaria, business, business rate, catastrophe, Child Benefit, claimant, Coalition, Conservative, council, council tax, CPI, Croatia, cure, cut, David Cameron, debt, defence, Democrat, deodorise, earning, earnings, economic, economy, false, falsify, fiddle, figure, fiscal, flood, frack, fund, George Eaton, George Osborne, government, Heathrow, hours, household, housing bubble, IFS, immigrant, Income Tax, individual, industry, inflation, Institute, interest rate, invent, Jill Filipovic, job, jobseeker, Jonathan Portes, Jonathan Wilson, Keith Vaz, Lib Dem, Liberal, low-paid, Matthew Hancock, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, National Institute, national insurance, New Statesman, NIESR, pay, Personal Allowance, politics, pretend, problem, reassessment, retail, rise, Romania, RPI, salary, sanction, self-employed, shale gas, Social Research, storm, Studies, swoob, tax credit, The Guardian, Tories, Tory, unemployment, uprating, upturn, Vox Political, wage, weather, Workfare


140124earnings

According to the beauty industry, women must now start deodorising under their breasts.

I kid you not – it was in The Guardian.

Columnist Jill Filipovic hit the nail on the head when she wrote: “I can already hear your objections: ‘But the area under my boobs doesn’t stink!’ or ‘What kind of marketing genius not only came up with the term “swoob,” but actually thought half the world’s population might be dumb enough to buy into it?’ or simply, ‘This is a dumb product aimed at inventing an insecurity and then claiming to cure it.’

“You would be correct on all three points.

“In fact, inventing problems with women’s bodies and then offering a cure – if you pay up – is the primary purpose of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry.”

The simple fact is that you don’t really need to worry about smells down there – a good old soapy flannel will cure any such problems.

That’s not the point, though. The aim is to get you thinking about it and devoting your energy to it, rather than to other matters.

Now let’s translate that to politics.

We already know that all the scaremongering about Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants storming the country from January 1 was a crock. That bastion of good statistics, The Now Show, told us last week that the total number of Bulgarian immigrants in the last couple of weeks was “around two dozen so far”, according to their ambassador. In the first three months after our borders were opened to Croatians, 174 turned up.

Yet the government wanted you to believe they would flood our immigration service in their millions, “taking benefits and yet simultaneously also taking all the jobs”.

My use of language such as “storming” and “flood” is not accidental. By far the more serious threat to the UK in the early days of 2014 was the weather – and, guess what, not only was the government unprepared for the ferocity of the storms that swept our islands, the Coalition was in fact in the process of cutting funding for flood defence.

This would have gone unnoticed if the weather had behaved itself, because we would all have been distracted by the single Romanian immigrant who was ensnared by Keith Vaz in a ring of TV cameras at Heathrow Airport.

Now the Tories are telling us that our take-home pay is finally on the rise for all but the top 10 per cent of earners, with the rest of us seeing our wages rise by at least 2.5 per cent.

The government made its claims (up) by taking into account only cuts to income tax and national insurance, using data leading up to April last year, according to the BBC News website.

This kind of nonsense is easily overcome – New Statesman published the above chart, showing the real effect of changes to weekly income for people in various income groups, and also provided the reason for the government’s mistake (if that’s what it was).

“The data used … takes no account of the large benefit cuts introduced by the coalition, such as the real-terms cut in child benefit, the uprating of benefits in line with CPI inflation rather than RPI, and the cuts to tax credits,” writes the Statesman‘s George Eaton.”

He also pointed out that other major cuts such as the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, and the 10 per cent cut in council tax support were introduced after April 2013 and were not included in the Coalition figures.

Once all tax and benefit changes are taken into account, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that almost all families are worse off – and the Coalition also appears to have forgotten the five million low-paid workers who don’t earn enough to benefit from the increase in the personal allowance.

Skills and enterprise minister Matthew Hancock compounded the mistake in an exchange on Twitter with Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). Asked why his analysis “ignores more than four million people in work (the self-employed)”, Mr Hancock tweeted: “Analysis based on ONS ASHE survey of household earnings data”.

Wrong – as Mr Portes was quick to show: “Don’t you know the difference between household and individual earnings?”

Apparently not. ASHE (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings) is a survey of employed individuals using their National Insurance numbers – not of households or the self-employed.

So the Coalition – and particularly the Tories – were trying to make us all feel good about the amount we earn.

That’s the distraction. What are we supposed to be ignoring?

Would it be David Cameron’s attempt to bribe councils into allowing shale gas companies to frack their land? Councils that back fracking will get to keep all the business rates collected from the schemes – rather than the usual 50 per cent.

He has also claimed that fracking can boost the economy and encourage businesses into the country, in a further bid to talk down dissent.

Or is it the growing threat of a rise in interest rates, which may be triggered when official unemployment figures – which have been fiddled by increased sanctions on jobseekers, rigged reassessments of benefit claimants, a new scheme to increase the number of people and time spent on Workfare, and the fake economic upturn created by George Osborne’s housing bubble – drop to seven per cent?

It seems possible that the government – especially the Tory part of it – would want to keep people from considering the implications of an interest rate rise that is based on false figures.

As Vox Political commenter Jonathan Wilson wrote yesterday: “If the BOE bases its decisions on incorrect manipulated data that presents a false ‘good news’ analysis then potentially it could do something based on it that would have catastrophic consequences.

“For example if its unemployment rate test is reached, and wages were going up by X per cent against a Y per cent inflation rate which predicted that an interest rate rise of Z per cent would have no general effect and not impact on house prices nor significantly increase repossessions (when X per cent is over-inflated by the top 1 per cent of earners, Y per cent is unrealistically low due to, say, the 50 quid green reduction and/or shops massively discounting to inflate purchases/turnover and not profit) and when it does, instead of tapping on the breaks lightly it slams the gears into reverse while still traveling forward… repossessions go up hugely, house prices suffer a major downward re-evaluation (due to tens of thousands of repossessions hitting the auction rooms) debt rates hit the roof, people stop buying white goods and make do with last year’s iPad/phone/tv/sofa, major retail goes tits up, Amazon goes to the wall, the delivery market and post collapses… etc etc.

“And all because the government fiddled the figures.”

Perhaps Mr Cameron doesn’t want us thinking about that when we could be deodorising our breasts instead.

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Facebook campaign to make ‘It’s Raining Men’ No. 1 after UKIP blame floods on gay rights

22 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Comedy, Politics, UK, UKIP

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

David Cameron, David Sylvester, equal, Facebook, flood, gay, Gospel, Henley, homosexual, it's raining men, marriage, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Nigel Farage, number 1, Scriptonite Daily, Thames, UKIP, Vox Political


I can’t reblog Scriptonite Daily articles, but this one will really beat the midweek blues so I’ll give you a taste and a link to the rest.

“UKIP Leader Nigel Farage’s headaches this week did not stop at being whacked over the head with a placard by protesters in Kent. A UKIP Councillor blaming recent flooding across the country on divine retribution for Equal Marriage laws transformed the party from a concern, to a laughing stock – and now a Facebook campaign is under way to make ‘Its Raining Men’ number 1 to celebrate.

“Henley on Thames Councillor David Sylvester wrote to his local paper to argue the nation was “beset by storms” because of David Cameron’s decision to act “arrogantly against the Gospel” in changing marriage laws. UKIP stood behind the comments until Sylvester went on to BBC Radio to defend them, at which point the party used emergency measures to suspend him.

“Since the show, UKIP and David Sylvester have been the butt of a million jokes, which show no sign of abating anytime soon.”

The full story is on Scriptonite Daily.

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Sink, Britain, Sink! – the cost of privatising water management

13 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Business, Health, Housing, People, Politics, Public services, UK, Utility firms, Water

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

co-operation, co-ordination, commercial, companies, company, competition, cost, council, DEFRA, delay, Department, disease, divert, drain, drought, environment, extraction, farm, firm, flood, food, government, healthcare, house, housing, integrate, land, local authority, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, money, National Health Service, NHS, overcrowding, plain, plan, planning, policy, possessions, private, profit, rain, reservoir, river, rural affairs, sewer, storage, Vox Political, water


– This is a song by a local musician, here in Mid Wales, written during the last serious flooding. I make no apologies for opportunistically linking to it as it says a few choice words about the situation and the government.

“And the rains came down, and the floods came up” – The Wise Man and the Foolish Man (Southern Folk Song).

Some of you may have noticed we’ve had a few spots of wet weather recently. This is nothing new to our island nation.

The trouble is, having fallen on us all, the water hasn’t had the decency to clear off and drain away. Instead, it has built up and up and caused a huge amount of flood damage to land and houses that were not built in a safe place, as in the song lyric quoted above, but in flood plains.

This is a result of bad planning – by water and sewerage companies that have failed to implement successful drainage schemes or to divert floodwater from rivers in order to prevent overflow, and by planning authorities that have allowed housing to be built in the wrong place.

What were they thinking?

My guess is that the water companies were thinking about the money, and planning authorities wanted to ease overcrowding.

We live in a country where management of the water supply went into private hands several decades ago. When that happened, it became impossible to have any kind of integrated plan to deal with the supply of water, droughts, floods and storage. Water supply became a commodity to be bought and sold by rich people according to the golden rules of capitalism: Invest the minimum; charge the maximum.

So reservoirs have been sold off to foreign water companies, meaning we have no adequate response to droughts. None have been built, meaning we have no adequate response to floods. Concerns about river flooding have been neglected. There has not been the investment in extraction and storage of floodwater that repeated incidents over the last few years have demanded.

The government is reducing its budget for handling these issues. Not only that, but it is delaying implementation of a new policy on drainage.

This would be regulated by local authorities, who have responsibility for planning approvals. Some might say these authorities should have had a little more forethought before granting applications to build on flood plains, or for adaptations to existing properties that have prevented water from draining into the soil and sent it down drains instead, to overload the sewer system.

Some of these are matters of necessity: Planning officers may have gone to the limit of what is allowed, in order to allow housing developments that relieve the burden of overcrowding; in other matters, they may have been unable to apply any legal restrictions on applications.

In short, there is no joined-up thinking.

There will be no joined-up thinking in the future, either – unless the situation is changed radically.

Meanwhile, the cost racked up by the damage is huge – in ruined farmland, in ruined homes and possessions, and blighted lives. And what about the risk of disease that floodwater brings with it? The NHS in England is ill-equipped to deal with any outbreaks, being seriously weakened by the government-sponsored incursions of private, cheap-and-simple health firms.

Something has to give beneath the weight of all this floodwater. Change is vital – from commercial competition to co-operation and co-ordination.

Privatisation of water has failed. It’s time to bring it back under public control.

Is anyone opposed?

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  • Here come the Skrulls! (Mike Reads The Marvels: Fantastic Four #2)
  • Mike Reads The Marvels: Fantastic Four #1
  • Boris Johnson’s Covid-19 u-turns (Pandemic Journal: June 17)

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