Author: by Stephen Hill
The floods in Somerset are an archetypal example of the fundamental error of the creeping bureaucracy of Big Government that today mars public finances and people’s lives everywhere.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s – and for countless generations before them – farmers used to get their tractors out in May and June, when the crops were growing, clear the levees, rivers, streams and gullies and dredge out the river weed, leaving it to rot on the banks in the summer sun.
Then along came some bearded, twitching, otherwise-unemployable do-gooder from the freshly-minted Environment Agency looking to poke his nose into an existing perfectly sustainable system operated by private initiative.
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This idiot accused the farmers of destroying wildlife by their dredging and, with his sole O-level in geography, drew up an expensive way of creating wildlife swamp areas to alleviate the flooding, bound to be caused by the lacuna of attention now not being paid to dredging.
Meanwhile, the government sends in what’s left of our army not engaged in utterly daft overseas fisticuffs to help, along with 100 sailors the MoD forgot to sack, with a few inflatables.
Then the Conservative and Lib Dem leaders appear in green and yellow wellies, pretending to be concerned and to know all about country matters and promising like King Canute, to deal with untamed nature of their own making… showing how useless politicians are in the real world.
The EA received £400,000 to clear the Levels, but can’t spend it as they haven’t got the equipments the farmers have! And these ‘leaders’ are only there to get on television, as there are quite a few key marginals around those parts. Surprise, surprise.
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