SEE the WOOD, SEE the TREES

In his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham last week, the Chancellor George Osborne scoffed that Ed Miliband had never once used the word “deficit” in his improvised address to the Labour Conference in Manchester. Labour wonks quickly hit back with the matching charge that Osborne had never once used the word “growth” in his own speech. Game drawn.

But neither Osborne nor Miliband nor Nick Clegg nor David Cameron in their respective conference addresses made any reference to the most overwhelming issue facing the governments of Britain and every other nation on earth: climate change. Six months back, in his only extended remarks on the matter since becoming Prime Minister two-and-a-half years ago, Cameron claimed that his tenure had already fulfilled his promise to lead “the greenest government ever”. That he felt he could claim as much with a straight face only emphasises how dirt brown and smoky grey successive British administrations have been content to be.

A melting glacier

Perhaps Miliband’s failure to allude to global warming was even more disheartening, given that he was the first cabinet minister (in the last Labour government) ever to hold the title Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Instead of launching his “One Nation” rebranding in his generally well-received speech, Miliband would better have taken possession of the phrase “One World”. Indeed, he could have extended it to reflect the anti-war stance he took at the time of the invasion of Iraq but forsook over Libya. Saving the planet requires keeping the peace as well as expunging carbon emissions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, based on the most rigorous and systematic research, the point at which global warming will begin to gather pace irresistibly and irreversibly will be reached around the beginning of 2017. It may already be too late to pre-empt this development – it may even be too late to delay it – but it will certainly transpire if governments act no more urgently than they are acting at present.

Flooding in Cockermouth, Lake District, 2009

An optimist in outlook and when contemplating my own circumstances, I yet find myself profoundly sceptical that the planet may be saved at all. I have no children and so I hold no direct stake in the survival of the human race. My line, which began in the primeval sludge, will have come to its end with my own expiration long before the lines of my friends who are parents peter out. When one dies (as I shall do some time in the next two or maybe three decades), the world effectively ends and the future must take care of itself. And I entertain no hope that the human race as a body is wise enough to recognise what is coming. The world will become lifeless, I venture, before the great-great-grandchildren of my friends have achieved a natural span, perhaps before the present century is out, and conceivably very much sooner.

The possibilities for planetary extinction have greatly increased in recent decades. There has always been the risk that some stray object will collide with us, as may well have occurred when the dinosaurs were wiped out. And it is a certainty that, at some great distance in the future, the earth’s orbit will have modulated sufficiently for it to move too near to – or too far from – the sun for life to remain sustainable.

But for nearly seventy years now we have possessed the nuclear option, a capability desired by any regime that seeks to reinforce or realign the balance of power. The global trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has dwindled sufficiently for public figures of many nationalities and philosophies to discuss unashamedly the supposed pros and cons of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Binyamin Netanyahu has called an election in Israel in the confident expectation that his Likud-centred government will be returned, whereupon he will argue that he has a mandate to strike against the supposed nuclear capability in Iran, even though such action is opposed by more than two-thirds of the Israeli electorate. And elsewhere there is the dread – whisper it – that some terrorist organisation might get its hands on nuclear materials.

Wildfire, southern California

Then there is the danger of pandemic. We might rewrite Twain’s bon mot – “a lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its trousers on” – in these terms: a virus can have infected half a nation’s population before medicine has found a remedy and bureaucracy has dispensed it. The planet’s immune system has clearly been eroded by the advance of intercourse (in every sense) between peoples, the breaking down of natural barriers, the invasion of wilderness and the concomitant opening up of avenues for opportunist organisms. The bacterium that can resist all known counter measures is a phenomenon increasingly encountered by researchers. Don’t discount the likelihood of some disease emerging that is so resistant and so fast-spreading that it swiftly eliminates the population of a whole continent.

Meanwhile, chemical preparations are continually released into the environment with insufficient regard taken for the consequences of their widespread and long-term use. The Environmental Audit Committee, one of the House of Commons select committees, is beginning an examination of the effect of pesticides on honeybees. We may hope for some forthright conclusions from it, chaired as it is by the feisty Labour MP Joan Walley and including among its members the former leader of the Green Party Caroline Lucas and the fiercely independent Tory environmentalist Zac Goldsmith.

The catastrophic decline in the honeybee population, both in Britain and elsewhere, is widely deplored, but the implications of the hole made in the larger picture by the loss of these critical pollinators are yet to be fully appreciated. Beyond this manifestation of the issue, however, all of us who live in or near the countryside have heard of cases of human disease, the contracting of which appears to be linked to chemicals used in agriculture. This is a subject that is going to be aired more and more in future.

Disasters on a massive scale do long-term – perhaps irreparable – harm to significant areas of the planet. In the light of the damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant caused by the earthquake off the coast of northern Japan eighteen months ago, I wrote a piece asking some (I hoped) pertinent questions about the astonishing proportion of the world’s nuclear plants that are constructed on or near the fault lines where tectonic plates meet: the piece has been by a huge margin the most visited posting in the history of this blog (Nuclear and Present Danger March 17th 2011).

The mighty ash

Accidents involving contaminant materials will grow more common as multinational corporations embrace diversity and size but cut costs incurred in safety and expertise. After the examples of Bhopal and Chernobyl, they know that there is a fair chance that they will be able to get away with merely wringing their hands over loss of life, maiming of children and long-term genetic effects, provided the victims are poor and have no one to fight for their rights.

As the polar ice-caps melt and the seas rise, rather more sophisticated and litigious people will be affected. No corporations or governments will lose sleep over the loss of islands in and coastal regions on the Indian Ocean, but when Southeast England, the eastern seaboard of the United States and thousands of miles of western Europe are submerged, there will be a scramble to escape blame. Do not doubt that the rich and powerful, having relocated their governments and offices to higher ground, will not hesitate to shrug responsibility onto world leaders who are now dead and lobbyists and consultants who moved on long ago.

Vested interests such as multinational corporations and free marketeers discount climate change as an issue but no credible scientist does, unless he is in the pay of vested interests. The vested interests are in climate change denial because research into safeguards both incurs present expenditure and implies reductions in future profit. Capitalists have precious little interest in the long-term. They invest and speculate in the hope of lining their own pockets, not the pockets of their descendants.

In any case, capitalism increasingly deals in services rather than goods, in intangibles rather than products. When natural disasters strike, such businesses are only tangentially affected. It is residential areas, stuffed with vulnerable stuff, that suffer most.

I reached for the familiar term “natural disasters” but increasingly the disasters that befall the planet are man-made. The clearing of rain forest, the rise in carbon emissions, the consumption of fossil fuels and the pollution of the environment on land and sea all contribute to a distortion of the conditions in which nature operates, such that weather patterns are significantly in flux. In Britain, everyone has been aware of and has grumbled about the lack of so-called traditional summer conditions. The rainfall in April, June and September was the highest ever recorded. There have been fewer sunny days than even those with the longest memories can recall.

An extremely unwelcome keel slug

And the changes are global. This year alone, widespread flooding has struck Fiji, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Peru, Romania, North Korea, Nigeria, Myanmar, New Zealand, Australia, Russia, China, Nepal and India as well as Great Britain and Ireland. Conversely, this year drought has plagued eight countries on the African continent as well as stretching from Mexico to Canada with devastating impact on agriculture across the United States. Global food shortages are bound to follow.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations warned seven weeks ago of the economic consequences for the region if far more is not done to halt climate change. Monsoon patterns are being disrupted with incalculable consequences for agriculture and the region’s capacity to feed its people. Myanmar MP Kyaw Thiha said of floods in his country “this is what climate change looks like”.

Extreme weather conditions create opportunities for the destruction of habitat. As well as the rising waters, the warming of the planet sparks more wildfires that, like floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, destroy indiscriminately and comprehensively.

Fire and flood, quake and storm create great damage and vast disruption and take many lives. People are saved and rescued as a matter of priority but wildlife is simply wiped out by these events. Even birds cannot fly without rest: if there is nowhere to perch and floodwater or flame to the horizon, they drown or incinerate along with everything that cannot fly.

Wildlife extinction gathers pace as habitat is destroyed and as poaching and over-hunting go unchecked. Extreme weather also disrupts the natural life cycles of wild creatures, particularly because the availability of food becomes so irregular. In a limited and anecdotal way, we observe this in our garden and our field. This year many fruits have failed: there have been no pears, plums or damsons, very few cooking or crab apples, raspberries, currants, nuts and acorns. The squirrels are driven to eating conkers, a phenomenon we have not observed in our field before.

On the other hand, the rain has greatly encouraged slugs and snails, which attack many crops and which have been so emboldened that their hitherto nocturnal activity has extended right through the day. Keel slugs, the largest and most dismaying variety, have become epidemic across our land at the same time that their predators – hedgehogs, frogs – are much more rarely seen than before. A combination of rain, lack of sun and slug attack has seen off our hopes for potatoes, carrots, pumpkins and strawberries this year. The lack of sun in the greenhouse has reduced our tomatoes too.

Constant rain greatly reduces creatures that move through the air. We have noticed far fewer flying insects of all kinds this year. It is a measure of desperation that on a relatively mild day like today, one may see a few dragonflies and butterflies still active so late in the season. Bats and birds are clearly less numerous. We are lucky enough that an extensive colony of wrens makes its home in our grounds and the cover we provide has helped them survive two successive severe winters – small birds in particular are vulnerable to the cold – but we fear that another testing winter will leave its mark.

Slugs routinely attack brassicas

In another part of the forest, a fungus from the continent is threatening our native ash trees, no doubt rendered more virulent by a concomitant reduction in the ability of the trees to fight invasive fungi. The ash is the most numerous of the trees on our property and its loss has not seemed like a threat before – indeed, we have taken down several full-grown specimens, including one that was undermining the foundations of the house, while pulling up ash seedlings and saplings by the dozen (they are by no stretch of the imagination difficult to cultivate). But the sudden possibility that they will all go is extremely disheartening. I recall the rapid spread of so-called Dutch Elm Disease some 45 years ago. It accounted for upwards of 25 million trees in Britain, including the majestic row that bordered the cricket field at my old school, a ground so well thought of that the county team played a home fixture on it every season.

The reduction and eventual extinction of flora and fauna may be thought of as an aesthetic issue – merely an aesthetic issue – or (if you want to be grandiloquent about it) a moral issue. But these matters should also give pause to those only detained by severely practical considerations. For the global system may only operate efficiently – or indeed at all – if every component is in place. As soon as we, in our preoccupation with our own “more important” concerns, ignore the tears in the fabric of the intricate interweave of the natural world, we risk setting off chains of harm that may well harm us too.

Leaders from Aung San Suu Kyi to Merkel, from Obama to Zuma are – perhaps understandably – preoccupied with concerns of global and national economy, of citizens’ rights and imagined political scandals. But unless they raise their heads from these small concerns, they will not be addressing the matter that should be the first consideration every day of their working lives.

Modern leaders are peculiarly mindful of their so-called legacy, of the benisons that will be credited to them in years to come. Only if the present generation of leaders manages to save the planet can they hope to go down in history, for otherwise there will be no history in which they will be able to go down.

SUBORDINATE LIVES

Thrift and, to a lesser degree, inclination keep us at home while others take their holidays. We are fortunate enough to have a house, land and a general environment that is very conducive to staying put. Even working from home takes no edge off the pleasure.

From a safe distance, we watch others sitting in traffic jams, sweltering in airport lounges, regretting the temporary accommodation into which they have stumbled. Holidays can be a pleasure, of course, and a necessary restoration. They can be much more than that: they can furnish some of the most glorious moments and memories of our lives. And equally they can be a disappointment, even a nightmare. East, west, home’s best.

The key word in that sentiment, though, is “safe”. From an even safer distance, we have looked on aghast in recent times as lives, homes, whole communities have been destroyed by flood, wildfire, earthquake, hurricane, drought, tsunami. Thousands of lives have been snuffed out. Thousands more have been deprived of everything. It’s unimaginable: losing in a few moments one’s family, home, friends, livelihood, land, pets, the tools of one’s trade, possessions, mementoes, livestock, neighbourhood – all of the things that define one’s existence.

All of these disasters are beyond our ability to resist or predict. They are natural events, the accidents of a moving, evolving planet. Or at least, they are up to a point. Many fires that destroy large areas are started carelessly, even deliberately. All of the other catastrophes, it can be argued, are made more prevalent by the degree to which we have exploited and polluted the planet. And the way that we behave brings closer another apocalyptic event, one that may become more common in the near future: pandemic.

But there is still another kind of disaster that can have just as devastating an impact on people’s lives, one that is entirely avoidable: warfare. In some respects, warfare (as well as being gratuitous yet willed) is even more damaging than the natural disaster. The intelligence about victims and casualties becomes caught up in propaganda. The impulse to help those affected, whether directly or by donation, is much weaker than in the face of an unwilled event and much more hampered by the ongoing nature of that event. Moreover, as is claimed to occur in Libya and Syria, those who seek to help may themselves become targets. And the toxic nature of modern weapons can continue to destroy long after the ceasefire, as any resident of Vietnam will tell you.

News organisations always want numbers to attach to disaster reports so that they can convey a sense of the scale of the event. But casualties of war are less diligently counted, harder to determine, more likely to be disputed. War propaganda routinely casts doubt on stories of civilian casualties and fiercely denies reports of atrocities. When evidence of civilian deaths and injuries begins to look harder to refute, the authorities issue a shrug: the term for such eventualities is “collateral damage”. The word collateral means parallel or alongside but it also carries the sense of being subordinate, of being of lesser consequence.

Military deaths are reported one by one, identified, praised and personally recalled. Civilian deaths are often unreported, mostly unrecorded, certainly not identified. The military personnel who receive wounds are rushed to the best available medical attention. The civilians who receive wounds must fend for themselves – crawl to someone who might help, stumble through wrecked streets at the mercy of falling masonry, snipers, bombs. Their hospital may anyway have been razed; if not, it will certainly be desperately short of staff, beds, power, equipment, medicaments, even basic dressings.

And the military don’t have to be there. Becoming a warrior is a career choice, save in those countries that impose conscription: China, Russia, Libya, Syria, Israel and most other middle eastern countries, many South American nations and – which may surprise you, as it does me – Greece, Denmark, Finland, Austria and Switzerland. The military are there out of choice – if not necessarily their own choice, certainly their government’s choice. They are equipped to protect themselves as far as is feasible. At worst, though certainly not eliminated, their risk is contained.

Civilians have no such advantages. They are where they live and, unless they are rich – and war casualties generally are not rich – that is their only option. They have no protection, no defence, nothing with which to retaliate, no basis from which to seek redress, no hope but the hope that the attack will end before their lives do.

In Libya, in Afghanistan as I write, as you read, or not long before or after, civilians are dying by the weapons of invaders, interferers, interlopers: the western powers, NATO, the supposedly civilised world. Lives and those things that make those lives are obliterated without a thought. It’s a price you have to pay, say the politicians and brass hats. It’s unavoidable. And there is the unvoiced subtext: it’s okay, it’s just collateral damage, it’s just ordinary people, they are of no significance.

If a bomber “took out” the family of Obama or Cameron or Sarkozy or Rasmussen or Petraeus, we would never hear the last of it. We would be asked and expected to feel and share that man’s pain. Does any one of them ever look back in the opposite direction at the Afghani man whose wife and children are killed by a misdirected US drone at a wedding, at the Libyan mother whose scared and ill-trained only son, obliged to defend Gaddafi, burns to death in a Libyan tank hit by a British missile more sophisticated than her family can ever hope to be?

The scars of the war in Vietnam will be visible – and present if invisible – for generations as yet unborn. Iraq, home to one of the world’s most ancient and lucid cultures, is a ruined land. So is Afghanistan. So soon will be Libya. Does nobody care about this wanton destruction of people and their civilisation?

Well, the NATO apologists will say, if the “great powers” had not acted, Gaddafi would have destroyed his own people? Would he? No one can ever know what would have happened had Libya been left to its own devices. What we know for certain is that Libya is wracked by civil war, a war that has been changed daily over five weeks by foreign powers. Everything that happens now in Libya is a product, to some degree, of the presence of sorties from the air by invaders. NATO is engaged and therefore is responsible. It is too easy merely to “blame” Gaddafi for everything. The invaders also have to own their actions.

In the modern world, as in the ancient, war is the option of first, not of last resort. Despots and governments, fundamentalists and rebels, generals and fighters stride into military confrontation with the intention of “winning”. It seems that they learn nothing from precedent. They have no plan B, no sense that the enemy may not fall down at the first puff of wind, no strategy for the unexpected, the long-drawn-out, the endgame. The moment that things stop being as a simple as a playground scrap, they start to tell lies, to seek to save face, to pretend that the end will be what is required, even if it turns out to be unrecognisably different from the stated or implied war aims at the outset.

Meanwhile, people die. The lives of ill-trained front-line troops are sacrificed. Bystanders who barely grasp the great causes at stake are mown down. Small children, whose task is not yet to comprehend the gutter into which they have been born, are orphaned, blinded, deprived of limbs, rendered zombies and mutes and psychopaths. Mean streets, the best that they know, are flattened. The earth is despoiled and will no longer sustain dependable crops.

And of course the damage done to the planet is not readily contained in the theatre of war. We may shit in the next field but the elements and the actions of living things bring the turds back into our own field. We unleash the dogs of war without taking the precaution of training them, directing them, studying their nature.

Humans have thousands of years of philosophy, diplomacy and historical study upon which to draw. How can it be beyond the glorious sophistication of mankind to contrive a mechanism whereby avenues other than taking up arms are comprehensively explored before a stone is thrown in anger? Cannot the UN be so constituted that territorial face-offs, tribal rivalries, disputed elections and perceived despotism are examined and the remedies negotiated before bodies and homes and productive land are destroyed?

Almost 2000 years ago, Tacitus wrote: “They have made a wasteland and called it peace”. In some translations, “wasteland” is rendered as “desert”. Perhaps those generals and politicians who talk airily about “drawing a line in the sand” in Libya – evidently unmindful that a line in the sand is about as easily eradicated a gesture as can be made – will consider, when they are done in that benighted land, whether they have enhanced the desert or merely rendered it unfit for habitation.

RUNNING SCARED

In Oxford on Thursday, I happened to pass a branch of the Northern Rock bank and, do you know, there wasn’t a single person queuing outside. Nor would there be ordinarily but earlier this week they were doubtless queuing round the block there, as at other branches. Watching the news footage of the queues and listening to the customers’ comments, as hapless as they were arbitrary, I couldn’t help wondering whether any of those standing in line to withdraw their life savings, some of them as far ahead of opening time as 5.00am, ever thought to themselves: “Maybe by contributing to this run on the bank I am actually making the situation worse”.

Panic is a weird mechanism. No wonder the cliché adjective that goes with it is “blind”. No wonder Clive Dunn’s Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army always accompanied his cry of “don’t panic” with a well-drilled pantomime of running in several different directions simultaneously. Panic is not merely unthinking, it is also wholly self-serving. “Panic buying” is stocking up in bulk against imagined shortage. It doesn’t matter to the buyer that his cornering the market in, say, lavatory paper leaves everyone else short, even ahead of the expected drying up of supplies (I use the terms ‘leaves’, ‘short’ and ‘drying up’ with no thought to any relevance to the form or function of lavatory paper).

You might think that it ought to occur to the exampled panic buyer of lavatory paper that, once an actual shortage has set in, his neighbours are liable to start to whisper to each other that he seems to suffer no such shortage, that a deputation – even an unruly mob – could appear at his door, brandishing the unwiped bottoms of their small children and aged dependants and demanding that he yield his selfishly grabbed supply.

When there was a clean water shortage in the west country in the wake of the early summer floods, people were caught on news camera finagling more than their designated share of handed-out bottles and hotly (because embarrassed as well as self-righteous) they argued that they had family duties of some exceptional order. The fact is that panic brings out the worst in people, leading them to clamber over others in flight from the burning building or the stampeding crowd, to shoulder the weakest aside in order to grab the supplies airlifted in for the relief of famine.

A man (a Brit, happily for the news story) managed to tear open the emergency door of the burning plane wreck in Thailand, thereby allowing others to escape as well as himself and, to my surprise, he was hailed a hero when all he did was something natural and obvious. I suppose if you take Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure”, the guy was being courageous. At least he didn’t panic.

On the other hand, the two police auxiliaries who declined to jump into a six feet deep lake to help a drowning boy who had himself jumped in to rescue his sister were robustly defended by their superior: they “weren’t trained” to save lives. Is that to suggest that trying to rescue him would have been the panicky thing to do, that phoning for the appropriate service to carry out that function was the correct response, even though the kid died? It’s not exactly a persuasive argument. I’ve never actually been trained to pay my taxes but I dare say the Inland Revenue will fail to sympathise if I try it on as a reason for getting my accounts in late this year, even if I say that I did contact the appropriate service (my accountant) and had to wait for her.

We all act in the heat of the moment and frequently regret it later. Queuing for hours is not exactly the heat of the moment and panic seems an inappropriate term for what went on at Northern Rock this week. But the self-protective instinct that panic betokens was certainly in play here. And it was just as destructive and blinkered as the panic of running about shrieking.

Meanwhile, you wonder how reflective and thoughtful was the BBC news reporter on business affairs, the fluffing, blustering Robert Preston, when he, as the BBC has been telling us all week, “broke the story”. He kept trying to justify it as important because it was “the first run on a British bank in 150 years” but of course the BBC’s coverage was the most influential ingredient in creating and spreading the panic that exacerbated the run. If the Bank of England and the Chancellor were tardy in their remedies for the situation, it was surely because they do not understand – as politicians and professionals for whom television is a marginal matter frequently do not – how influential television is on the inert portion of the population. The viewers may not believe everything they read in the papers but they still think “the camera never lies” and if it’s “on the box” it must be so. All I pray is that no latter-day Orson Welles – needless to say without a soupcon of Welles’ talent – is permitted to attempt a contemporary equivalent of the master’s wireless version of The War of the Worlds. We’ll all be killed in the ensuing hullabaloo.

TAKE MORE WATER WITH IT

One of the earliest vivid memories I have is of the flood along the east coast of England on the night of January 31st 1953. I was five. We didn’t live there and we were yet to have a television, so the only images in my head must emanate from press coverage on February 2nd or, even more likely, from my imagination. The vividness comes from the fact that Uncle Bob and Auntie Pat were caught up in it. They lived in King’s Lynn with their little daughter and at least one elderly parent. When we learned that people were being drowned in the town (in the end 15 people there lost their lives), we had to cling to hope of good news. At last we learned that they were all alive and in reasonable spirits, given that their home was overwhelmed by the waters. Later that year, they moved to a new place out of town.

Two thousand people in King’s Lynn were made homeless that night and, along the coastline, 32,000 were evacuated. The deaths in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex totalled 304, with a further 177 – two lifeboatmen, 45 fishermen (we had a fishing industry then) and a ferry full of passengers – lost at sea. In the Netherlands, as many as 1,835 drowned. At King’s Lynn, the sea level rose more than eight feet. Sea defences on the east coast were breached in 1,200 places. In 2003, the cost of this disaster at then values was estimated at £5billion [information from Benfield Hazard Research Centre and Flood London websites].

Of course there have been infinitely worse floods in other parts of the world. In August 1931, the Yellow River in China overwhelmed dozens of townships and an estimated 3.7million perished. Half a million drowned in the cyclone-driven floods of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), images of which I still recall 37 years after the event. The same area suffered lesser but still murderous devastation 16 years ago [information from The Hutchinson Factfinder, an indispensable volume].

The floods in the North-East, the Midlands and the West are to such vast calamities as a chimney blaze is to The Great Fire of London, though not of course for the families of those individuals who lost their lives. In Texas and other southern and mid-western states, there has been far worse flooding this week than anywhere in Britain. Nonetheless, to have floodwater accompanied by raw sewage cascading through your home is a vile and heart-breaking blow and the cost of making good the damage will be eye-watering. Happily for us, our household was not affected by this week’s flooding. When there were extensive floods in our area three or four years back, a friend asked if we had been caught up in the deluge. “No” I said. “We’re 600 feet above sea level here”. “Ah,” came back my friend, “that’s what they said in Atlantis”.

It’s true that climate change and global warming mean that those places that have always felt safe from rising water have less cause for complacency. But the Yellow River and Bangladesh floods demonstrate that weather can bite deep without any need of help from the carbon emissions endgame. Even so, projections of threat to low-lying areas (starting with the Maldives and great swathes of the Indian subcontinent and the low countries, moving on to New York and London) are real enough. Those of us now dry will not remain unaffected by such developments then – millions will move to higher ground – just as we are not unaffected now: the costs will hit us all.

There has been widespread criticism of government and local authorities on the ground that we were “not prepared”, that cutbacks have postponed attention to flood defences. This is a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string issue. As with the NHS, even if you throw the whole of the GNP at the target, it will still not be enough. Where are the areas in Britain that you can point to and declare with total conviction: “There will be never be flooding here”? How far up the predicted level of rise in the seas can you plan before the whole enterprise is beyond our ability to contemplate? In addition to the cost of attempting (increasingly Canute-like) to hold back the waves, what expenditure can you calculate to be earmarked in order to deal with millions of refugees?

Well, you may say (as I often do) “expenditure is all down to political will. When a government says ‘we can’t afford this’, what it means is ‘we want to spend the money on something else’. Whatever the calls on public finances, prime ministers who are determined to go to war will always manage to find and spend the vast sums that war consumes, however futile that use of the money might seem to everyone else”. But the colossal cost of making every community in Britain safe against any eventuality of freak weather and against any conceivable result of climate change is way beyond a simple matter of rebalancing the budget, however creative Alistair Darling may turn out to be as Chancellor.

I have one of my modest proposals. Let the Brown government commission the most exhaustive study of Britain’s requirement for flood defences in any credible future scenario. Let the exercise be fully costed. Let the rise in the rate of income tax required to finance the building of these defences be calculated. And then let the House have a free vote on the matter so that the people may see what each member feels is the correct response, regardless of calculations about party advantage, having canvassed her own electorate. The voter could not then argue that the government or local authorities were to blame if his home were awash with foul water because his representative would have reflected his view, constituency by threatened constituency. As well as proving an interesting experiment in determining the degree to which short-termism and self-interest inform the electorate’s thinking, the exercise would also provide an unprecedented overview of Britain’s readiness, both physical and psychological, to face a very uncertain future.

A brief PS to the previous entry: I happened to be required this week to record my postal address on a hitherto unvisited website and, as usual, was obliged to click “United Kingdom” as the country of residence. However, when the information was re-presented to me for confirmation, the nation had been magically altered to “GB”. There is still hope.