David Handley Farmers fed up with being lectured to

IF anyone has applauded the Government’s announcement about extra cash for flood defences then they should stop, reflect and realise that this is only money that we should already have been spending to protect vulnerable areas of the country.

To protect them from something which experts have been warning us for two decades at least to expect: heavier, more localised rainfall and generally stormier weather.

But the Environment Agency, it seems, has been far more concerned with nature conservation than actual protective measures which is why, when we had a couple of extreme weather events, things were so bad in parts of Wales, Yorkshire and the

West Midlands. And what of the Somerset Levels, where the floods of 2013 and 2014 caused such devastation and which you might have expected to be hit again?

No problems. Curry Moor, east of Taunton, was flooded but that is a fairly routine occurrence. No homes were affected anywhere, no businesses flooded, no farmers washed out of house and barn.

All because in Somerset the Environment Agency was forced to admit it had got it wrong when it said dredging wasn’t necessary, a widespread dredging programme was put in place and the area is now controlled by a new rivers authority made up of people who actually know what they are doing and who know, moreover, that the way the landscape has been managed for the last eight centuries is the only way it can be managed.

Misguided environmentalists like

George Monbiot continue to try to blame flooding on farming practices but with each successive deluge another bit of his case is washed away: we are in a completely different scenario now and even if farmers plant trees and introduce other mitigation measures in the headwaters of rivers they are not going to stop flooding – particularly if rivers have been left undredged.

It’s time to stop knocking the farming industry for these events and to ask why, if the resumption of dredging cured the flooding problem on the Levels, a similar regime wasn’t rolled out across the whole country.

Why did neither the EA nor the Government consider it to be a priority for funding? Why has it taken the infliction of misery on thousands of homeowners to focus attention on the heightened risks and goad ministers to do something about them.

I and a lot of farmers are becoming rapidly fed up of being lectured to about our contribution to global warming – and so, by implication, to the raised threat of flooding – by environmental campaigners who clearly believe they can go to any lengths they like to make their point.

Even to turning one of the nicest green spaces in the middle of Bristol into something close to a maize field after a wet harvest.

If I had organised a farmers’ demonstration there you can be sure Plod would have banged us all up and we would now all be facing criminal damage charges and the likelihood of punitive fines.

But then, there always was one law for farmers and one for everyone else.

If I had organised a farmers’ demonstration there you can be sure Plod would have banged us all up