Publicly Subsidised Flooding?

Yet one more time George Monbiot, writing in yesterday’s Guardian, has his knife in the government’s environmental policy. He maintains that the massive farming subsidies the government have pumped into grouse moors (mostly owned by their chums) are responsible for the widespread flooding in northern England.
While I’m not qualified to make all the connections made by Monbiot, he does seem to have a good point.
Here’s the Guardian article, and here is the fully referenced version.