40 days and 40 nights
If only! I’m northern and positively enjoy the odd downpour but even I’m getting a bit fed-up with all the rain of late. But I’m also a bit fed-up with hearing about it being this government’s fault, that government’s fault, the environmental agency’s fault, the council’s, the local authority’s, or the planning department’s. Ironically it’s no-one’s fault, and it’s everyone’s fault; we ALL need to accept our complicity in the current predicament. Even God with his so called ‘act’.
Of course, one admires the damp testimony of stoic householders, who appear on TV to explain their situation and how they called and called the council to get some sandbags before going to the local B&Q and doing it themselves. And, needless to say, failing. This only serves to highlight that the inevitable, and highly commendable I hasten to add, Dunkirk spirit, cannot battle against the power of nature and its potentially uncontrollable force. Individuals can’t cope, communities can’t cope; transportation & communication systems can’t cope; power networks can’t cope; Victorian sewage systems (understandably) can’t cope: our infrastructure is both past its sell-by-date and not fit for purpose. Perhaps it’s some form of poetic justice that the country that initiated the industrial revolution has been so woefully unprepared for the climate change it unwittingly ushered in. Isambard Kingdom Brunel must be spinning in his grave!
Predictably however it was only when ‘the effluent hit the affluent’ in the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead that the Tories sprang into action, with Davey-Boy declaring that, in the face of the floods, “money is no object”. For decades, if not for a generation or two, we have been ignoring large scale public sector funding of infrastructural projects. By abdicating its nationwide responsibility for such investment and turning it over to the private sector, successive governments & institutions have undoubtedly dug the (sink) hole we now find ourselves in.
It is now time to put an end to the vanity and London-centric projects of HS2, and put our collective-heads together in solving these national issues in the long-term. Even though it’s been born in the face of adversity, there has to be some excitement in considering the good that can come out of this situation. Here is a countrywide project that can provide strong, sustainable growth and one that can truly address the problem of long-term unemployment. I sincerely believe & hope this wet winter can prove to be a turning point, representing the time we woke-up and started investing in our own future, and stopped relying on the half-ar*ed public/private initiatives or waiting for global multinationals to do it for us: the storms of 2014 may yet prove to be the welcome winds of change.
