This is not another thread on floods but a thread on a total incompetent in charge of a key government agency, who when an emergency came and found his agency wanting not only lacked the guts to really get down to visiting on site those suffering from his agencies poor decisions but cannot even be bothered to visit other parts of Britain where flooding is extensive and EA staff are working their socks off. Most of all by clinging on to a job that he has manifestly shown he is incapable of doing and which he has not even bothered to try to do since the disaster struck, he has just emphasised that there is no level to how low he is willing to fall to cling on to the money he receives but does not earn.
The EA, actively under Lady Young and inactively under Smith have placed wildlife well ahead of protecting homes and industry (and lets remember farming is an industry and has a much right to protection as any other).
All he has done since the floods struck is bring out a series of responses aimed at keeping his nose clean. First he was outraged that all those hardworking EA staff were being criticised when they were working so hard. They weren't being criticised, everybody has gone out of the way to speak highly of staff on the ground and make clear it is he and his top managers who have been woefully inadequate.
Then he made one half-hearted, furtive visit to see the floods in Somerset, then fled back to his office and hasn't found any need to make any further visits his own staff working so hard in flooded areas elsewhere.
Today he was back to suggesting in a memo to staff that they are being criticised unduly, when to repeat they are not being criticised, he is
His final insult is to blame those living on the flood plain for buying houses there. Well when we bought our house 20 years ago there were no nice convenient web sites showing flood maps and it never occurred to us. The village we were moving to had no history of flooding or near floods - and I have known it for most of my life and remained that way until 2007, and 2014.
He is also a man so grand and so rich that he has never struggled at the bottom of the housing ladder desperately trying to raise enough money to buy one of the houses in the lowest price band. In many places this means buying a little Victorian two up two down, which were often built on the flood plain. That applies to York, Oxford, Reading and many other places. My DS's first house was such a property. In his case it was protected by flood defences built 50 years previously, but even they nearly failed in 2000.
Rant over. I feel so much better.
They used to live , and probably still do, in the vicarage at Granchester, immortalised in the WW1 poem named after it "and is there honey still for tea?"
