Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Just completed a telephone survey with MPM.
2517

What was it about?

Somerset Levels floods: Cut off - and furious

With parts of Somerset still under water after a month, locals want answers from the Environment Agency


By Philip Johnston

10:35PM GMT 27 Jan 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10599445/Somerset-Levels-floods-Cut-off-and-furious.html



Yes, I remember Muchelney – the name. For the best part of two decades we would stop for family picnics by the ruins of the old abbey as we headed down to the far-flung reaches of Devon.


The ancient landscape of the Somerset Levels was always bewitching, though in winter and early spring we would tend to drive on by as the area was often waterlogged or flooded, a reality not lost on previous inhabitants. One possible derivation of the county’s name is that Somerset means land of the summer people – because that was the only time of the year when it did not flood.


Over the centuries, from the foundation of the monasteries at Muchelney, Athelney and Glastonbury in Saxon times, the land has been drained, reclaimed and maintained. It needs to be: the rivers running through the Levels flow above much of the farmland, hemmed in, like the Parrett, by ancient embankments that are occasionally breached by heavy rains or high tides.


So there is nothing new about floods in the Levels. What is unusual this year is the scale and disruption of the inundation that has kept 20,000 acres of farmland under water for a month or more. It has officially been declared a “major incident” by the county council. Muchelney is cut off and reachable only by boat; the nearby village of Thorney has been abandoned; even sizeable towns like Langport are hard to get to.






This is the second time in three years that the area has been flooded to this extent, if not for such an extended period. Of course, there have been weeks of relentless rain, but it is hard to believe there have not been similar deluges before. Why, then, is the flooding so much worse now than in the past? Local people have no doubt who is to blame: the Environment Agency.

On Monday, Ian Liddell-Grainger, the Tory MP for Bridgwater, fulminated on behalf of his beleaguered constituents, angrily denouncing the “pathetic” quango’s failure to keep the waterways clear. “It is not acceptable that the people… in that entire area of the Levels are yet again facing more problems,” he said. “The Government needs to act, and pretty damn quickly.

“We really are in a dreadful position and the Environment Agency is responsible. They cannot walk away from this – they have got to do the job they were set up to do, which is keep people safe.”

Inevitably, the Environment Agency took issue with this. Its spokesman, Robbie Williams, said: “If you lower the beds you increase storage in the river – [but] that’s tiny compared to the floodplain, so lowering the bed often does little. With the rivers so full and high, the vast majority of our pumps are not able to pump.”

Mr Williams said a great deal had been done to improve flood defences and David Cameron praised the work of the Environment Agency’s staff. But this misses the point. Of course the workforce has made huge efforts to deal with the consequences of flooding; what local people are angry about are the years of apparent neglect by the Environment Agency since it took over responsibility in 1990 for cleaning and clearing the drainage ditches and canals, known locally as rhynes.

On his visit to the Levels on Monday, Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, felt the full force of local anger. He has asked the Environment Agency and other interested organisations, including the local council, to produce a plan within six weeks for its long-term protection, which could include dredging rivers.

Mr Paterson made the perfectly valid point that the Levels are an artificial system needing careful management. There were, he averred, no wider policy implications for national guidelines. Many would question that assertion. The Environment Agency has been accused before of failing properly to carry out the basic measures needed to ensure floodwater drains away. Nor is this the first time that its long-term planning has been called into question.

After widespread floods in 2007, when a third of a million people were left without tap water and the bill for repairing the devastation topped £6 billion, an official inquiry chaired by Sir Michael Pitt found an alarming level of complacency in government, national and local, over the continuing threat from exceptional weather. The Pitt report called for an “urgent and fundamental change” to the way we defend against flooding, with a 25-year master plan supervised by a dedicated Cabinet committee. What happened to that?

While people expect the Somerset Levels to flood, much of the damage in recent years has been inflicted upon homes built on land that is also prone to inundation but which has had to be released because of the demand for housing. Planning controls were relaxed in the 1980s to allow building on floodplains. Even here, though, the Environment Agency has faced criticism over the failure to clear out culverts and other rain run-offs that might reduce the risk.

There was a time when much of this routine maintenance was carried out by local people. In the Levels, the ditches and sluice gates were built by the monks who managed the land until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Subsequently, farmers did the job.

But once the state assumes responsibility for these tasks, it has a duty to ensure that the work gets done. As Liddell-Grainger said on Monday, if the Environment Agency did the big jobs, such as dredging the rivers, local people would ensure the routine maintenance was carried out.

The MP thinks the agency has its priorities all wrong and is neglecting its principal function of protecting farmland in favour of wildlife and conservation projects. It was happy to spend £31 million on a bird sanctuary, the MP said accusingly, but not the £4.5 million needed to dredge the rivers.

He derides the agency’s bosses as “a bunch of townie do-gooders and twitchers”, adding: “They think the Levels should be allowed to return to the swampy wilderness they were in the Middle Ages – and all in the name of managed flood risk.”

This anger is understandable and has been heard before from other parts of the country. After the 2007 floods, leaked minutes showed breathtaking incompetence and complacency in Whitehall. The Labour government was warned that flood defences were inadequate and that spending cuts would make matters worse.

The Coalition faces the same charges – that it has reduced central spending on flood defences and in order to impose the financial burden more directly on the areas affected. It has a point: why should taxpayers living in areas that are not flooded have to fork out for people who have chosen to live by a river or bought a house on a floodplain?

Yet that still does not answer the question that the people of Muchelney have been asking these past few wretched months: why has the flooding got worse (and not just in the Levels) in the years since the Environment Agency took overall responsibility for dredging and clearing?

As huge pumps at Bridgwater and elsewhere struggle to siphon the floods back into the rivers, the people of Somerset want to know why the agency, alerted by the inundation of 2012, did not use the last couple of summers to get the defences into a state of readiness.

Ian Liddell-Grainger is adamant: “This is not a freak act of nature, it is unforgivable negligence,” he says. Worst of all, it’s still raining.

There are now local environmentalists saying that dredging would make things worse due to in creasing the flow rates in the rivers causing bigger problems downstream and increasing the risk of rivers breaking their banks.

that is why they are now asking the dutch to give their unparallelled expertise

Last week it was the Police arresting men for taking scrap food from a rubbish bin , Now its another major crime , so serious that former Prime minster Gordon Brown had comfort the victim.

http://www.parentdish.co.uk/2014/01/31/english-born-schoolgirl-verbally-abused-Scottish-classmate/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cuk%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D240465#!slide=aol_1004999


Sasha's mum Teresa said: "My concern is that the situation could possibly get totally out of control if nothing is done now before the referendum vote takes place later in the year.

electionista ‏@electionista Jan 31
UK - Populus poll:

CON 32%
LAB 39%
LDEM 11%
UKIP 10%
Expand

MaxK sorry for the delay, it was a Political Monitoring survey.
2517

Latest ICM Wisdom Index in which respondees are asked to predict party shares for GE2015 has CON 31.1 LAB 33.4 LD 15.8 UKIP 11.7

Well done Wales.

Come on France.

Well Done Wales my arse, lucky bastards!

electionista ‏@electionista 2h
UK - Opinium/Observer poll:

CON 29%
LAB 36%
LDEM 8%
UKIP 17%

The polls are all over the place.

But old labour are consistently ahead (Red Ed)



Heaven help us :-(

if the best they can must is 7%, and that seems to be a fairly consistent number at the moment, then i doubt very much if that will translate into an overall majority - whatever sticky may like to scream from the rooftops

however, it is a matter of fact that when the constituences were rejigged by labour (i'm sure), it resulted in a more favourable slant fro labour - that is to say, labour did not require as large a % of the vote as the tories to get into power

It is only a 70+ seat majority for Labour.

I see the leader is calling Manuel to order.

This is more like it.

Addressing the hazy party adherents.




Kill the badgers.

Never mind the NHS is falling apart again.

Gove has the right ideas.


Call Andy to help us.

David Cameron puts human rights at centre of Euro election plan

PM to rally Conservatives for European elections with a radical plan to overhaul human rights law after backbench rebellions and the Referendum Bill defeat






By Tim Ross, Political Correspondent

7:25AM GMT 02 Feb 2014







David Cameron will seek to re-launch his European policy after a series of damaging setbacks with a radical plan to curb the influence of human rights laws, Conservative sources have said.


The Prime Minister is expected to make reforming Britain’s relations with the European Court of Human Rights the centrepiece of the Tory campaign for the European Parliament elections in May.


A committee of senior Conservatives has produced a package of measures to scale back the power of human rights judges in Strasbourg, in order to ensure that British courts always remain the final arbiter of the law.


“We want to make the Supreme Court supreme,” one source said. The proposals are expected to include a promise of a new Act of Parliament to establish the superior status in law of UK courts over the European Court.


If the new law cannot be made to work, the Conservatives are expected to threaten to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court.



More hot air here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/10612464/David-Cameron-puts-human-rights-at-centre-of-Euro-election-plan.html

If he does he is becoming a member of the fascist right of the Conned party.

He is pushing UK further a further away from having any influence in EU.

What will he do next to hang on to personal power.

Vote for Cruellla.

No wonder the Scots want to separate from the London mob.

Update - Labour lead at 5
by YouGov in Politics
Sun February 2, 2014 6 a.m. GMT

Latest YouGov / The Sunday Times results 31st January - 2nd February - Con 34%, Lab 39%, LD 8%, UKIP 11%;