Thursday 13th February

There must be nothing more annoying when your house is flooded than the sight of a srum of reporters and cameramen following a Politician down the street.   As you are desperately waiting for some real help; a pump, soldiers, some sand bags – along comes a Wally in Wellies.

But what else can they do, the Politicians I mean.  They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  If they stay at Westminster they are branded as unsympathetic, uncaring and ignoring the plight of these poor folk.  If they turn up and try to talk to people they just get abused for doing too little, too late.  Even poor Ed Milliband got an earful for not sending in the troops earlier, and he isn’t even in the Government.  All the hapless Politican can do is promise that “lessons will be learnt”, which of course they won’t be.  They never are.  Until the next disaster and then there will be more handwringing and more lessons will be learnt.

The trouble is that if you look at the pattern of flooding over the last few years the floods have been all over the place.  If only the rain would fall in the same place, if only the same rivers would break their banks, if only the sea would attack the same bit of coastline then the job would be much easier.  There have been a few lax developments where houses were built on flood plains, but many of the areas flooding now have rarely if ever flooded before.  And if it really is down to Global Warming and we are in for far more of this stuff then a different long-term solution must be found.  You can only shore up river banks for so long.  I suspect that despite all the talk it will only be when London itself is threatened that a real change will happen.  There will be a few millions more for the Environment Agency until the next round of cuts but until the City and the Banks are deluged I doubt that we will see anything more than platitudes and even more Wallies in Wellies.