Category Archives: current affairs

current affairs, environment

Farming Floods

Yet again George Monbiot has applied his pitchfork to the tender parts of the government’s environmental policy. Yet again it is all to do with flooding. Here is the large part of his article in the Guardian of 17 February — he says it all so much more succinctly than I could.
How we ended up paying farmers to flood our homes
This government let the farming lobby rip up the rulebook on soil protection — and now we are suffering the consequences.
It has the force of a parable. Along the road from High Ham to Burrowbridge, which skirts Lake Paterson (formerly known as the Somerset Levels), you can see field after field of harvested maize. In some places the crop lines run straight down the hill and into the water. When it rains, the water and soil flash off into the lake. Seldom are cause and effect so visible.
That’s what I saw on Tuesday. On Friday, I travelled to the source of the Thames. Within 300 metres of the stone that marked it were ploughed fields, overhanging the catchment, left bare through the winter and compacted by heavy machinery. Muddy water sluiced down the roads. A few score miles downstream it will reappear in people’s living rooms. You can see the same thing happening across the Thames watershed: 184 miles of idiocy, perfectly calibrated to cause disaster.


Mud (aka. silt) pours straight off this field near the source of the Thames.
Photograph: George Monbiot

Two realities, perennially denied or ignored by members of this government, now seep under their doors. In September the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, assured us that climate change “is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting”. If two months of severe weather almost sends the country into meltdown, who knows what four degrees of global warming will do?
The second issue, once it trickles into national consciousness, is just as politically potent: the government’s bonfire of regulations.
Almost as soon as it took office, this government appointed a task force to investigate farming rules. Its chairman was the former director general of the National Farmers’ Union. Who could have guessed that he would recommend “an entirely new approach to and culture of regulation … Government must trust industry”? The task force’s demands, embraced by Paterson, now look as stupid as Gordon Brown’s speech to an audience of bankers in 2004: “In budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers.”
Six weeks before the floods arrived, a scientific journal called Soil Use and Management published a paper warning that disaster was brewing. Surface water run-off in south-west England, where the Somerset Levels are situated, was reaching a critical point. Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water — instead of percolating into the ground — is now pouring off the fields.
Farmers have been ploughing land that was previously untilled … leaving the soil bare during the rainy season. Worst of all is the shift towards growing maize, whose cultivated area in this country has risen from 1,400 hectares to 160,000 since 1970.
In three quarters of the maize fields in the south-west, the soil structure has broken down to the extent that they now contribute to flooding. In many of these fields, soil, fertilisers and pesticides are sloshing away with the water. And nothing of substance, the paper warned, is being done to stop it …
Maize is being grown in Britain not to feed people, but to feed livestock and, increasingly, the biofuel business. This false solution to climate change will make the impacts of climate change much worse, by reducing the land’s capacity to hold water.
The previous government also saw it coming. In 2005 it published a devastating catalogue of the impacts of these changes in land use. As well as the loss of fertility from the land and the poisoning of watercourses, it warned, “increased run-off and sediment deposition can also increase flood hazard in rivers”. Maize … is a particular problem because the soil stays bare before and after the crop is harvested, without the stubble or weeds required to bind it. “Wherever possible,” it urged, “avoid growing forage maize on high and very high erosion risk areas.”
The Labour government turned this advice into conditions attached to farm subsidies. Ground cover crops should be sown under the maize and the land should be ploughed, then resown with winter cover plants within 10 days of harvesting, to prevent water from sheeting off. So why isn’t this happening in Somerset?
Because the current government dropped the conditions. Sorry, not just dropped them. It issued … a specific exemption for maize cultivation from all soil conservation measures … The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.

When soil enters a river we call it silt. A few hundred metres from where the soil is running down the hills, a banner over the River Parrett shouts: “Stop the flooding, dredge the rivers.” Angry locals assail ministers and officials with this demand. While in almost all circumstances, dredging causes more problems than it solves, and though, as even Owen Paterson admits, “increased dredging of rivers on the Somerset Levels would not have prevented the recent widespread flooding”, there’s an argument here for a small amount of dredging at strategic points.
But to do it while the soil is washing off the fields is like trying to empty the bath while the taps are running.
So why did government policy change? I’ve tried asking the environment department: they’re as much use as a paper sandbag. But I’ve found a clue. The farm regulation task force demanded a specific change: all soil protection rules attached to farm subsidies should become voluntary. They should be downgraded from a legal condition to an “advisory feature”. Even if farmers do nothing to protect their soil, they should still be eligible for public money.
You might have entertained the naive belief that in handing out billions to wealthy landowners we would get something in return. Something other than endless whining from the National Farmers’ Union. But so successfully has policy been captured in this country that Defra … now means Doing Everything Farmers’ Representatives Ask. We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.
Yes, it’s a parable all right, a parable of human folly, of the kind that used to end with 300 cubits of gopher wood and a journey to the mountains of Ararat. Antediluvian? You bet it is.
A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com/2014/02/17/muddying-the-waters/
From www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/17/farmers-uk-flood-maize-soil-protection
Now tell me, please, why there is no need to reform agricultural practices?

current affairs, environment

Beavers

I’m coming to like the idea of beavers. And no, I don’t mean those, I mean the animated furry kind. Oh maybe not that either … the animals what build dams in rivers, m’lud.
I used not to think much of these animals, but research seems to be showing that they really do have a beneficial effect on water management, otherwise known as flood control.
And beavers are back on the agenda (well, maybe) because a large part of southern England is under water thanks to a record breaking deluge over the last 2-3 months. December and January rainfall has been the heaviest in England and Wales since records began 240 years ago — and it looks as if February is about to join them.
According to New Scientist the rains have been exacerbated by the weather in Indonesia and the tropical west Pacific — no I don’t get that either but then I’m not a meteorologist. But regardless, we’ve had several oceans of rain recently and consequently there is much flooding in southern England.
There is an argument going on about whether rivers were dredged sufficiently, and whether if they were it would have made any difference. On the one side we appear to have the UK government who say rivers must be dredged more and they’ll pay — mainly because they’re trying to appease agribusiness. On the other hand every hydrologist being quoted is saying dredging would, at best, have made no difference and would likely have made things worse.


I think I might just trust the hydrologists rather than the politicians.
Joining in with the hydrologists is environmentalist and thinker George Monbiot. His piece in the Guardian at the end of January mocks the politicians’ unseemly positions but also makes many salient environmental points which the politicians appear to have missed (or ignored).
Quoting from an Environment Agency report, Monbiot says:

“Dredging of river channels does not prevent flooding during extreme river flows … The concept of dredging to prevent extreme flooding is equivalent to trying to squeeze the volume of water held by a floodplain within the volume of water held in the river channel. Since the floodplain volume is usually many times larger than the channel volume, the concept becomes a major engineering project and a major environmental change.”

He then says:

Is that not bleeding obvious? A river’s capacity is tiny by comparison to the catchment from which it draws its water. You can increase the flow of a river by dredging, but that is likely to cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream when the water hits the nearest urban bridge … If you cut it off from its floodplain by turning it into a deep trench, you might raise its capacity from, say, 2% of the water moving through the catchment to 4%. You will have solved nothing while creating a host of new problems.
Among these problems, the Environment Agency points out, are:
1. Massive expense. Once you have started dredging, “it must be repeated after every extreme flood, as the river silts up again”.
2. More dangerous rivers: “Removing river bank vegetation such as trees and shrubs decreases bank stability and increases erosion and siltation.”
3. The destabilisation of bridges, weirs, culverts and river walls, whose foundations are undermined by deepening the channel: “If the river channels are dredged and structures are not realigned, ‘Pinch Points’ at structures would occur. This would increase the risk of flooding at the structure.” That means more expense and more danger.
4. Destruction of the natural world: “Removing gravel from river beds by dredging leads to the loss of spawning grounds for fish, and can cause loss of some species. Removing river bank soils disturbs the habitat of river bank fauna such as otters and water voles.”

Yep, that’s right: dredging is a tool for improving navigation not land drainage. If you want to prevent flooding you need to do things like:

• More trees and bogs in the uplands — reconnecting rivers with their floodplains in places where it is safe to flood …
• Making those floodplains rougher by planting trees and other deep vegetation to help hold back the water — lowering the banks and de-canalising the upper reaches, allowing rivers once more to create meanders and braids and oxbow lakes. These trap the load they carry and sap much of their destructive energy.

So how should all this be done?
Well one answer appears to be beavers!


Yes, beavers. The pesky furry critters what fell trees and build dams.
We used to have beavers in this country but they were hunted to extinction here several hundred years ago — they lasted until Tudor times in Scotland but disappeared from England long before that.
Why beavers? Well to quote from a Wild Wood Trust document:

Beaver are considered to be a ‘key-stone’ species because they have the ability to create and maintain wetlands by building dams and digging ditches. They also create coppice, selectively felled areas of woodland. In doing this they provide essential habitat for many other species of plant and animal. Wetland areas and coppice must currently be maintained artificially, at significant cost to the public. Beaver damming activity has also been observed to filter pollutants out of the water, leaving streams cleaner.
Wetlands are … fragile ecosystems, but they can also act as a flood defence and could protect homes across the country. After heavy rainfall, wetland areas and flood plains act as a sponge, holding excess water and releasing it slowly, preventing sudden rises in water level and flash floods …
Beavers have been reintroduced across Europe, and have not caused any serious ecological problems. Reintroductions have been extremely successful as long as the population density is low enough that the beavers do not come into conflict with human activity.

There’s a fuller report, by Natural England and People’s Trust for Endangered Species, on reintroducing beavers to England here.
Sure, beavers likely aren’t going to do a lot of good actually on the Somerset Levels. But they will help if they are present on the uplands which drain into the Levels. One of the keys seems to be the need to manage water flow much higher up the valleys than the actual areas currently being flooded.
But of course that’s counter-intuitive both to the affected residents and to politicians. And of course neither trusts the experts who they employ. If you’re not going to listen to experts — insisting instead on a DIY fuck-up — then don’t waste money employing them.
So the bottom line is we need to reintroduce beavers.
What a great idea!
Meanwhile I’ll leave you with George Monbiot’s final salvo:

Cameron’s dredge pledge is like the badger cull. It is useless. It is counter-productive. But it keeps the farmers happy and allows the government to be seen to be doing something: something decisive and muscular and visible. And that, in these dismal times, appears to be all that counts.

current affairs, medical

Transforming the NHS

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As regular readers will know, transforming the NHS so that it can provide excellent healthcare to people in the UK at an affordable cost is something which has exercised my mind for a long time (see, for example, here and here). And I am involved, at a local level, in trying to help unlock this.
Now don’t get me wrong. Many parts of the NHS are excellent. In an emergency they generally work brilliantly, at least in the short-term. And many of the doctors and nurses care deeply about looking after the patients.


However whenever I walk into any NHS hospital, clinic or office** there are several things which immediately strike me:

  • the obscene level of waste
  • the absence of appearing professional
  • the number of staff who seem to spend their lives wandering around doing little or nothing
  • the appalling environment
  • the apparent lack of both money and the will to put any of this right.

And that is despite the fact that the NHS should already have shed-loads of money to do everything we would want it to do if it used it wisely.
The other day I had to visit a local private hospital, and the contrast with the NHS was almost as stark as it has always been. No, it wasn’t perfect. For a start it was far too hot, but it was clean and looked professionally welcoming. Yes, there were plenty of staff around, and they all appeared to be doing something with a purpose. You had a degree of confidence that everyone knew what they were doing and why and that they cared about their patients.
This is more what the NHS should be like. But how to get there?
I keep thinking about this and here’s my three step plan for the paradigm shift which the NHS requires, from top to bottom.
Step 1. Get someone at the top who can successfully run a large, quality, profitable corporation and who is able and willing to tell the politicians to butt out and stay out. Someone like Richard Branson, or perhaps Alan Sugar (no, I don’t care that you dislike them; they’re good at what they do). Someone who will have a vision of how the organisation should be and will implement it regardless of push-back from any level — if you aren’t going to do the job, get out.
Step 2. Tackle the appalling level of waste. This includes finding efficiencies — improved ways of doing things — at all levels. And that means everything from reducing bloated layers of managers and administrators, through cupboards full of medical supplies which have to be thrown out because they go out of date while other departments can’t order the very same thing, to turning down the heating.
Yes, really! Turn the heating down! NHS hospitals, clinics and offices are always far too hot; when people who are usually cold tell me it’s too hot then you really are wasting money! Just this one thing could save the NHS millions.
And while you’re saving money, fix the buildings: even if you can’t build new hospitals (because of time, money or space) you can at least make the ones you have into a habitable environment. Fix the leaks etc. Stop the draughts. Buy some paint. Because they will save you even more money in the long run.
Do those two things and you will start to see a culture change. But to complete the paradigm shift you need to do something just as fundamental the the outlook and attitude of all the staff — from the most world renowned consultant surgeon to the lowest lavatory cleaner. So that means …
Step 3. Everyone needs to take on board four basic beliefs and habits:

  1. Cherish the patients. They are why you are doing what you do. They’re not just important they are your whole raison d’être. They deserve the best.
  2. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes, whether they’re a consultant, GP, patient, nurse, administrator or ancillary worker. Think what effect things will have on them. And then treat them as you would like to be treated.
  3. Work as a single team. Everyone is equal but everyone has different skills. It doesn’t matter if you’re a patient, the most renowned surgeon or the ward cleaner, everyone has an important role which has to be valued as important to the patient’s recovery. (And part of that means valuing people and paying them decently.)
  4. Be empowered. If it is right and needs doing, do it. This has to come from the top by giving everyone freedom (not bullying), and it has to come from the bottom with people grasping that freedom. Unless there is an over-riding reason not to do something, just do it.

No, I don’t pretend it will be easy. That’s why you need the right person, with the right attitude, at the top. Without that one person it will never work because the politicians will keep meddling and the all the vested interests will see the top as weak and keep playing their own games. And then the patient (remember him/her?) is forgotten.
Yes, initially there will be a lot of scepticism and probably a morale hit. But as time goes on, as it begins to work and people start to buy-in, morale will increase and you’ll win lots of crusaders.
But it will take time. I went through this in a multi-national corporation in the 1990s and it took the best part of a decade, lots of head-banging, a lot of people being retrained and several rounds of redundancies for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust. So I’ve seen it done; I was looking up from the bottom wondering WTF was happening; after a couple of years the penny dropped and I too changed. I know it can be done.
So David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt, do you have the balls to do this?
I’m not holding my breath.
____________________
** This also applies to some GP surgeries although most are better as they are small stand-alone businesses which have to keep afloat.

current affairs, sexuality

In Defense of Working Girls

If I believe what I read in (some parts of) the press the authorities seems to be unreasonably waging war on London’s prostitutes, especially in Soho. And no doubt this is going on elsewhere in the UK too.
There was an interesting, and rather worrying, article in yesterday’s Observer under the banner:

Rupert Everett in defence of prostitutes:
‘There is a land grab going on’
The prostitutes of London’s red-light district are being evicted …
Rupert Everett argues … that closing down the brothels
has nothing to do with protecting women

A protest in Soho by sex-workers and representatives from the English Collective of Prostitutes

If what Everett writes is correct, and while I cannot verify it I have no reason to disbelieve it, then there appears to be a conspiracy between the law enforcement authorities and the judiciary (backed by business) to vilify and persecute prostitutes in the name of stamping out “trafficking”.
Yes, trafficking cannot be condoned and needs to be clamped down on. But it seems that many “working girls” have not been trafficked, are not involved in trafficking, and are not being controlled by pimps — all of which would be illegal.
Prostitution in itself is not illegal in the UK, and (unlike in some countries) neither is paying for sex. Everything I read indicates that most (not all, but most) “working girls” are doing so from choice and not coercion. Trafficking is illegal, so is “living off immoral earnings” (ie. pimping) and soliciting on the streets.
In my book everyone, female and male, has the right to sell their body for sex if they so wish. And everyone has the right to buy sex. Arguably prostitutes provide valuable services to those (a) wanting something different, (b) who have strange fetishes they couldn’t otherwise fulfil and (c) who might otherwise be/feel disenfranchised in the sexual marketplace. We are all entitled to our sexuality, whatever form that takes, just so long as it is between consenting adults.
Whether you like it or not prostitution is a fact of life and one which, whatever the law says, will not go away. So like many other things we would be wise to recognise this and bring it out in the open where it can be regulated. (If you make it legal you can then regulate and tax it, which surely also has to be good for the economy. See also marijuana.)
We need to normalise sex, prostitution and sex workers. Criminalising them just forces them underground where there is far more danger because then they can (and will) be exploited by the criminal fraternity. Keeping them in the open is actually safer for everyone: prostitutes and punters.
I’ve never used the services of a prostitute, and I can’t imagine I ever will, but I can see no harm in the activity as long as it is not in the grips of the underworld — but sadly that seems to where the authorises want to shove it. Eeejits!

current affairs

Boris on Europe

There was an interesting article by Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph in which he asks if “Europe” is going to turn out to be one of those things which we’re always told are necessary but turn out not to be.

KCM598
Click the link to read the full article

As always with Boris the article is well written and well argued, with rather deeper thoughts than may at first meet the eye.

current affairs

On the Passing of Nelson Mandela

Aside from the obvious (well who’d have guessed he was about to die?) here are a few thoughts on the passing of Nelson Mandela.
Let us remember that, in today’s values, Nelson Mandela was first a terrorist leader, and (whether rightly or not) he was convicted of such.
Had he lived almost anywhere but South Africa he would have been locked up for life without any prospect of a get out of jail free card. As, in fact, he was!
That he did get out of jail is largely down to the dysfunctionality and instability of South Africa at that time.
Mandela made the most of the opportunity and turned it to good, which was no mean achievement!
Consequently I suspect that until now South Africa has held together as well as it has because of his very presence. He may no longer have had any formal power, but his influence would, I’m sure, have been very real. And who knows what mafia-esque machinery turned behind the scenes?
I sincerely hope South Africa continues to hold together, return to stability and becomes a respected African nation again. However I fear that it won’t.
There seems to be a big danger that the factional infighting and feuds, which are still there, will surface in what is an inevitable power vacuum. And that this will lead to a descent into anarchy and civil war, if not an outright tribal bloodbath — black vs white, Xhosa vs Zulu etc. Which is much the route trodden by their neighbour Zimbabwe, amongst others.
I hope I’m wrong. The South Africans have invested too much in getting this far to even contemplate such horrors.

current affairs, medical

In which I Wonder about Local Politicians

North-West London NHS last year consulted on proposals to rationalise the delivery of A&E services in the hospitals in its area. One element of this is the closure of A&E at Ealing Hospital, close to where I live. This is unlikely to happen for at least three and probably five years.


Needless to say the majority of the local community are up in arms, assisted by some very cynical sound-bites from local politicians and campaigners who see this as a threat to the very existence of the hospital (which according to the consultation it isn’t). Indeed the local council have taken the whole matter to the courts and failed to get a judicial review of the consultation process. Currently a final decision is awaited from the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt; this is expected within days.
Following the refusal of the judicial review there was, last weekend, a rally to continue the voicing of protest. According to the reports this attracted a paltry 100 people — clearly the local rent-a-mob don’t like going out in the rain! At the rally Ealing Council Leader, Julian Bell, vowed to fight on and “chain ourselves to the gates before they roll the bulldozers in”.
Whether you agree with the proposals or not, this is just so pathetic. Not only does this portray Cllr Bell as a bad loser, has he actually thought this thing through?
By the time any bulldozers move in (and they should as the current hospital building is hardly fit for purpose) the proposals to which objections are being raised will have been implemented and the hospital will still be operational. According to, and as I understand, the plans the bulldozers would be clearing only a part of the present Ealing Hospital site to enable the building of a new, modern healthcare facility alongside the existing hospital. Only once the new facility takes over could the present building be closed.
So all Cllr Bell seems to be doing is delaying the implementation of improved healthcare for his constituents.
Is Cllr Bell really this stupid? Or is it me that’s missing something?