In this piece reprinted from Counterfire, Lindsay German looks at what the severe flooding in Britain tells us about the system.
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1) Climate change is a reality, and those who deny it are the equivalent of those who persisted in believing the earth was flat, against all scientific evidence.
Sea levels are rising worldwide, weather is becoming more unpredictable and this is affecting food production, where people live and how they carry on their livelihoods.
2) The lack of flood defences is about more than recent government cuts, although these are contributing to the disaster. In Britain, there has been a systematic attack on spending on infrastructure going back more than 30 years. Every area has seen cuts that cause problems somewhere down the line.
Train companies don’t cut back overhanging trees, so when bad weather occurs, railway lines are blocked. Nurses are sacked and wards closed in hospitals, so there are not enough facilities to care for the sick. Lack of investment in flood defences or dredging has left large areas of the country more vulnerable to flooding.
3) Since Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s, planning restrictions have been weakened or abandoned. This has led to widespread building on flood plains, meaning that higher numbers of people are subject to flooding. The private builders who make a profit from the houses, supermarkets and roads that they build make no contribution to future flood defences.
4) Privatisation has worsened the situation. The private owners of utility and rail companies prefer to pay their shareholders dividends than invest in infrastructure that does not turn an immediate profit. They cut jobs to save on wages. So when there are problems, they do not have the resources to solve them.
5) Changes to the countryside, for example cutting down trees, appear to have worsened the problems of flooding. But through subsidies to farmers, the government encourages these practices.
6) The failures of government and the Environment Agency cannot be placed at the door of local government minister Eric Pickles alone. They are the result of many decades of profit-led policies, privatisation and austerity. They are also symptomatic of a lack of planning and long-term strategic thinking throughout government.
7) The combination of these factors marks a society in decline. Brunel built the railway in Dawlish in the 1840s. Dutch engineers from the 17th century onwards helped drain the fens and levels in England with a sophisticated system of drains, dykes, rivers and dams. We are going backwards in these respects.
8) Politicians attack each other, but it is clear that mainstream politics is incapable of dealing with these issues. The government is now bringing in the army, but why do we have the largest army in Europe but not any adequate civil defence? This comes down to political priorities.
9) Any serious attempt to deal with climate change and its consequences needs to restrict free market capital and control carbon emissions. The government has no will or capacity to stand up to the vested interests who have created these problems in the first place, and who use a tame media to trivialise or ignore the issues.
10) To begin to deal with the problems therefore requires systematic campaigning, but also an understanding that the way society is now organised, on accumulation of capital and the profit motive, is destroying the planet and must be transformed.
