UK flooding again tops the news, and I’m reminded of a series of
posts I wrote after Christmas 2013. The first
showed how austerity led to a sharp cut back on flood prevention. The
second
pointed out that the consensus was that spending on flood prevention
should be rising because of climate change, but the environment
minister was a climate skeptic. The third
noted how the government had managed to deflect any significant
criticism until now, but I thought surely that cannot last. At the
time it became one of my most widely read posts, but when the
government thereafter continued to avoid serious criticism except for
a handful of articles I realised how weak our media had become in
holding the government to account.
I have no idea if any of the most recent floods can be directly connected
to the post 2010 cuts, but that is not how these things work. We
cannot prove that each of these severe weather episodes are linked to
climate change, but we work with probabilities. Unfortunately the
media find it hard doing the same.
Here is the time series for spending that I found in the House of
Commons library.