Who Caused The Floods? Welfare Claimants, That's Who.

As the flood waters begin to recede, so the blame game will commence.The Tory's will abdicate all responsibility for the floods and try and pin it on the Environment Agency. Although they will brag about the homes that have been protected by flood defences that have been built and the investment involved.They will fail to mention, of course, that homes were saved from flooding because of investment made and defence's that were built by the previous labour government, not this current government. Only in five years time will we know whether the Tory bragging about their alleged increase in investment will be nothing but hot air and wet carpets. I think I already know the answer.
The problem of preventing flooding in low lying areas is a much more intricate and awkward problem to solve. It will not be solved. It will not be solved or even alleviated, because to do so would require a minority section of society to act in a manner that is beneficial to the nation and detrimental to themselves and that would be counter intuitive to any way this particular group have ever acted before. It would also involve Tory's implementing policies that would adversely effect this very small section of society. Unfortunately, the Tory's involved in implementing that policy are also part of this small section of society, so it would be a case of defecating in your own nest. The group involved? Well as I have intimated in the heading of this piece, they are welfare claimants, but not the demonised and stygmatised group so often pilloried in the right wing press. No, this particular group of welfare claimants are lorded over, indulged and idolised and never have to face the same level of abuse experienced by the likes of the residents of James Turner Street off the recent programme 'Benefits Street'. This group of benefit claimants contain some individuals who happily play the system and claim upwards of 10x the amount a single mother could claim. Who are these people who are in receipt of  upwards of £260,000 in benefits per year? Well reader, they are farmers and landowners. They are the owners of grouse moors and vast country estates. They are people such as The Queen, Prince Charles, The Duke of Westminster and several Tory MP's. They are members of a union ( National Farmers Union) that has a representative sitting in the cabinet and acting on their behalf. A claim no other union in this country could make.
While this government were imposing a benefits cap on the poor of this land, its representatives were in Brussels preventing the EU from implementing a cap on farming subsidies that would have capped the amount these extremely rich individuals could have claimed. It would have meant a saving of over £1bn for the British Taxpayer. The cap is discretionary. Surprise, surprise, this government has decided not to impose it.
So what has this to do with flooding you may ask? Well, one of the main reasons for flooding is water runoff from higher ground, that feeds the rivers and streams or floods directly onto lowlands . Farmers and landowners are expected, in order to be in receipt of subsidies, to complete a soil and land protection review. Farmers must protect their land from compaction and erosion and ensure fertility, defend water supplies and protect the ecology of land and rivers. Many farmers pay lip service to this requirement, they compact farmland with heavy machinery, leave fields fallow for most of the year, clear unproductive land and obliterate the local wildlife of land and rivers with the use of poisonous phosphates and neonicotinoids that destroy the bee population. Add to that the mass illegal slaughter of predators such as crows, magpies, raptors and mammals, that landowners and gamekeepers perpetrate with total impunity, using poisons such as carbofuran or shooting, the destruction of woodlands, wetlands, and forests on grouse moors, and you have a wildlife holocaust being perpetrated by an old boys club and being unwittingly paid for by the taxpayer. Checks are few and far between by the Rural Payment Agency and in actual fact, this government is attempting to reduce the number of inspection so that most farms would receive an inspection perhaps once every 60-80 years. Hence the reason many farmers play the system, pocket the subsidy and happily preside over the rape, erosion and destruction of landscape and wildlife, while laughing all the way to the bank.
One way of preventing flooding in low lying areas is to ensure the land on higher ground is forested and planted and wildlife corridors consisting of bogs, meadows and woodland are created around farmlands and rivers. This in turn will trap water and prevent it from emptying onto the land below as well as increasing the bio-diversity of our countryside. A bio-diversity that has been decimated by farming practices. Rivers should not be dredged because a dredged river becomes an express waterway that sends high levels of water cascading down onto lower ground.
But the creation of wild areas is not incentivised, it is decentivised by Regulation GAEC 12. This requires farmers and landowners, in order to receive their subsidy, to remove any 'unwanted vegetation'. To a layman, 'unwanted vegetation' means woodlands, bogs, and wild areas. So if a tree starts to grow, it gets cut down, if a bog starts to form, it is cut out, if an area of unused farmland becomes overgrown with vegetation, it is levelled. Yet it is these areas of natural habitat that will ease the pressures of water runoff lower down in places such as the Somerset Levels. In fact Regulation GAEC 12 is the one regulation that is aggressively policed by the Rural Payments Agency, yet it is a regulation that harms the countryside rather than benefits it.
So there you have it. Implementing practices that would alleviate the suffering of many people would prove detrimental to the bank balances of the rich and wealthy and with a government whose main objective is to politically and financially serve the interests of this small elite, the chances of any policy changes that benefit the wildlife and the 99% of the population that do not benefit from The Common Agricultural Policy are very slim indeed.

Halal Meat

The slaughter of animals for halal meat without stunning is disgusting. Why anybody would consider it acceptable to inflict on a sentient being such a brutal and barbaric death is uncivilised and inhuman. The people performing the slaughter and those who accept it disgust me. Before you leap in and accuse me of Islamaphobia or anti-semitism, I will make it clear that I do not care which religion encourages this practice. I couldn't care if it was the bloody Jedi religion. I would still consider the people who practice it and those that condone this abhorrent practice as disgusting, uncivilised,savage,barbaric scum.

I also include in that sub-human group,the people involved in employing unimaginable cruel and barbaric practices in snake slaughter houses and the grotesque, vacuous  fashionistas who condone the brutality by poncing about in their designer snakeskin shoes with their blood-soaked snakeskin handbags draped over their arms.

May an eating disorder prevail over you.

Crisis Appeal.

Reader, your help is needed. Within the next two years, a mammal, only indigenous to Britain, could become extinct. This is a unique mammal, as it was once warm blooded, but has now evolved into a cold blooded creature. It once roamed Britain from the windswept coasts of the south west to the cold and rain lashed highlands of the north-east. But now, large swathes of its once heavily populated habitat are empty. Environments, such as university campuses, NHS hospitals, food banks , disabled centre’s and areas suffering severe deprivation, where this mammal would frequently be seen grazing and making promises they were sure they would never have to keep, are now virtually free of sightings.

This species, that once lived on a diet of hummus and veggie burgers and could easily be spotted by its familiar plumage of beard (male and female), brown or mustard coloured corduroy trousers and loose knit cardigans, has now, in an attempt to survive, widened its diet to feasting on the poor, constantly breaking promises and dumping its once proudly held principles of fairness and opportunity for all, whilst now sporting a boy band haircut and an Armani suit. Sightings have diminished and are restricted to brief glimpses within the Westminster area of London, normally as it speeds past in a government limousine.

Can you help reader? Within two years, Rattus LibDemus could be no more. Although it does not have the charisma of the panda, or the majesty of the white rhino, even though its proclivities are unpleasant, with its penchant for supporting secret courts, its inclination to support the tory’s in their constant attacks on the poor, its appetite for privatising the NHS, it’s liking for tax cuts for the rich and starting a war in Syria, its failure to prevent Gove, the Education Minister, from returning education to the 1850’s, while simultaneously selling our schools to speculators and profiteers and lying about tuition fees, and it’s abject failure in preventing the tory’s from demonising the poor and committing their crimes against the underprivileged and vulnerable. If you can help save this once noble species.

Please don’t!!!!!!!!!!!Just stay well out of it. 


Democracy?

"The government will not enforce sanctions or freeze Russian assets because the needs of the wealthy are far more important than democracy".

(David Cameron might have said that).

" Grief is the price we pay for love".