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.
The impact of austerity is clear, but by including spending already
committed in 2010/11 and choosing the right dates ministers managed
to get away with saying that spending had not fallen on their watch.
Anyone with these figures could have blown that cover, but I hardly
saw this chart anywhere else in the media. Equally almost no one
picked up on the fact that spending should have been on a rising
trend because of climate change, and linked that to the views of the
then environment minister.
Until then I had
thought that the government had got away with austerity partly
because the impact of the cuts had not been very visible. Flooding
was highly visible, yet the links with austerity were completely
absent from the media beyond the Guardian and FT. So, in that rather
negative sense, this episode became an education for me. An education
the public was denied.
A tale of austerity- Liquidity excess but investment dearth
ReplyDeleteOn Today, one resident complained that if it was a Tory region they would have been looked after. Was he right? Should the residents of Cumbria start voting Tory to prevent flooding?
ReplyDeletePenrith and Carlisle in the north-east of Cumbria are Tory-held (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Parliamentary_constituencies_in_Cumbria), and have been affected by the floods (see map at http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/07/chaos-cumbria-floods-lake-district-turn-lives-upside-down). Admittedly much of the affected area in the western Lakes and down into Lancaster is Labour held (+ Tim Farron's Lib Dem constituency), but it's far from obvious that this is politically targeted incompetence rather than the more general kind.
DeleteI'm from Whitehaven in the Copeland district of Cumbria, and it seems more like there's a correlation between level of flooding and level of Tory-ness than the other way around, but this could be a example of ideological bias on my part.
DeleteThe badly flooded areas include: Carlisle on the northern border with Scotland which is Tory-held in terms of its mayor and its MP; Penrith on the Eastern border is held by Conservative Rory Stewart; Keswick and Cockermouth are in Labour-held Copeland, but to be honest, they consider themselves to be much posher than jam-eaters like us and so are more Tory in temperament; and finally Kendal is held by Lib-Dem leader Tim Farron, who might seem either tory-ish or the opposite depending on your political outlook (Kendal definitely has a more 'monied' feel than Copeland if you don't include Keswick and Cockermouth in that consideration).
Whitehaven and its nearby neighbour Workington were largely unaffected by the floods, and both are Labour held for Jamie Reed and Sue Hayman respectively.
Obviously, though, the reason we didn't get flooded is more because of geography rather than a lack of investment in flood prevention, but it seems likely that a lack of investment as per Simon Wren-Lewis's arguments could also have a strong influence for the flood-hit areas too. Copeland is doing very badly with regard to its NHS provisions at the moment, and there's a great deal of worry that we're about to lose what little pre-natal facilities that we currently have (with the upshot that Copeland women with emergency birthing difficulties might have to travel 60 minutes to Carlisle to get life saving treatments - hopefully without Carlisle being flooded at the time).
Apologies, but I made a mistake on Cockermouth's district as it's in Allerdale not Copeland (and both are boroughs rather than districts too). It's still a bit posh and tory-ish though.
DeleteThanks for the clarification.
DeleteIt seems that the complainer on Today was confused about who his MP is!
Anyway, it seems that Cumbria did receive 'investment' in flood defences after the last one (2009) but it does not seem to have stopped it flooding this time. Money well spent?
ok so you would like action to be taken...but the construction industry seems to be constrained. All economists seem to want infrastructure projects. We have Crossrail, we have the masses of construction projects happening in London from Marylebone to the Elephant and Docklands. Construction capacity is constrained. What would you do to build capacity? At the moment there is no room for a multiplier effect.
ReplyDeletePlease continue to highlight media deficiency - excellent and important work. I find the uncritical, tame, uninformed, simplistic media bias to be truly disconcerting given how much it frames the national debate and ultimately election outcomes.
ReplyDeleteThanks, JL