Neglecting the basics

IF a picture is worth a thousand words, the photographs in yesterday’s Mail speak volumes about decades of government neglect of our most basic necessity.

In the North, water gushes in torrents from the overflow systems of reservoirs in Yorkshire and County Durham.

In the South, riverbeds are parched and cracked, reservoirs drain away… and from tomorrow, 20million people face a hosepipe ban, predicted to last all summer.

With similar restrictions expected to become ever more common, surely any child of ten can see the solution.

Yet there are still no official plans for a national grid to pipe our abundant surplus water to the areas that need it. Meanwhile the water companies go on extorting inflation-busting charges from their captive customers, while letting their infrastructure fall into disrepair.

Indeed, the seven firms imposing the bans leak almost 300million gallons a day.

And water is not the only essential that ministers have negelected. As Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary warned last night, their failure to plan realistically for future energy needs threatens to cripple our economy and lead to industrial decline.

‘We’re going backwards, not forwards,’ says Sir Bernard Ingham. And who can doubt him, when the chief energy regulator says our increasing dependence on foreign gas puts our country at risk?

What kind of future can our children look forward to, when ministers look no further ahead than tomorrow’s headlines?