Where Is The Plan?

In Winter, if there is two inches of snow, trains stop running, the roads seize up, and schools are closed. The latter hardly ever happened when I was a kid. We've gone backwards rather than forwards compared to sixty years ago. Now, a couple of days of reasonable Summer weather has the media in full cry about killer heatwaves, climate change, and water companies imposing hosepipe bans, and talk of drought. But, they have been going on about climate change for decades, so why was there no actual planning and implementation of measures to cope with it, if they even just believed their own rhetoric, rather than repeated pie in the sky talk about measures to reduce carbon emissions over the next few decades, which, even if it happens, will not have that much of an effect?

Indeed, considering the potential of climate change resulting in drier Summers, and potentially wetter Winters, Autumns and Springs, wouldn't an obvious thing have been, in the intervening period, to have built several more large reservoirs to capture all of that additional water so as to use it, when required? Would it not have been advisable to have created a national water grid, in the same way that we have a national electricity grid, gas pipelines, and communications infrastructure?

Between 1991 and today, around 5.5 million new homes have been built in the UK. In the same period, the UK population has increased by 10 million, or by about a 17%. Why do I compare with 1991? Because that is the year that the last reservoir was built in Britain. Is it any wonder that with 5 million additional houses, and a population 17% bigger, that existing reservoirs have started to be run down, in a dry period?

And, that is not the only factor. During that period, we have had many of those new houses built on flood plains. What consequence does that have? Well, as the name suggests, a flood plain is where rivers normally flood into during rainy periods. The water then soaks into the ground in those flood plains, or is conveyed downstream more slowly. The water is able to soak down into the subsoil, and into the water table, available at some later date, when dry conditions arise. But, if you cover over the flood plains with large amounts of concrete and tarmac, not only do you get the consequence that the river ignores that, and does what it would have normally done, thereby flooding the houses that have been built, but it also means that the water itself cannot lie on that flood plain, does not soak into the water table, and so is not available at some later drier time.

Nor is that all. Because these large numbers of houses, along with associated, roads, shops and so on have been built on these flood plains, and people don't like having their houses flooded, they have complained and demanded that their foolish decision to buy in such a location be bailed out by society spending huge amounts of money in flood defences. What do the flood defences do? They channel the excess water into much more powerful flows that then surge downstream, again preventing the water from hanging around and soaking into the water table, and instead, then, causing flooding to homes downstream, whose owners themselves demand yet more concrete be poured, so as to establish yet more flood defences, and send the water in even greater quantities further downstream, until eventually it disappears into the sea.

And, even where houses are not built on flood plains, a similar thing arises. Councils thought years ago it would be a good idea to have houses built with little provision for parking cars, so as to discourage people from having cars, as they sought to improve the environment, and have people travel by public transport and so on. That was never going to happen, and with even less provision of public transport, it was a non-starter.

So, as people would pave over front gardens to provide parking space, they also facilitated builders producing houses that had smaller gardens, which the builders love, because it means they can get more houses on any given area of land. So, all of the garden area around houses that used to exist, in the past, is no longer present in newer developments, so there is again no capacity for those gardens to act as natural repositories of rainfall, and other precipitation, again reducing the water passing down into the water table. Instead, all of these concreted and tarmac areas, simply act to channel rainfall quickly off roofs and so on, and into gulleys and surface water drainage, again speeding it on its way to the sea, rather than into the water table, or into reservoirs where it could be used to provide for the needs of all these additional homes and people.

As the NFU have pointed out, we have millions of litres of water running from rivers into the North Sea, every year, and that is water that could be captured and retained in reservoirs if they had been built over the last 30 years. Indeed, as some have also pointed out, there is still water in many parts of the country, but without a national water grid, it cannot be easily moved to where it is required. Surely, if governments had taken seriously everything they have been saying for decades about climate change, they should have planned for it, and put in place all of this required infrastructure!

In the early 1960's, I remember, one Winter, there being both electricity and gas outages. The teacher asked us, one day, why they had happened. I knew, because my dad had already explained it to me, by complaining that it was all down to the fact that the government had failed to make the necessary investment in power and gas production in the previous years. The teacher, however, did not want to hear such a “political” answer to her question, instead wanting us to talk about the unprecedented weather conditions the country was experiencing at the time. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

At that time, it was, of course, correct to blame the government, directly, because all energy production was nationalised, and had been for 20 years, so that the inadequate nature of supply was, indeed, the fault of the government. Today, we have privatised water and power generation and supply. But, can the government and the state wash its hands of their failure to have made the necessary investments in infrastructure? Of course not. Even if it does not control those companies, it is its job to regulate them, and to set the conditions in which they operate, as well as to establish its own national infrastructure plans. Where are they?

Modern industrial capitalism/imperialism is founded upon large-scale socialised capital, and it, in turn, requires a large, interventionist, social-democratic state to plan and regulate the national/international economy, in the same way that it plans and regulates its own production and investment. But, for the last 30 years, the state has been failing in that responsibility. It is a consequence of the fact that conservative parties fell under the control of the petty-bourgeoisie, whose interests are antagonistic to those of socialised capital, and who, instead, sought smaller states, and lower taxes, implying less social investment. At the same time, the ruling class itself, which today consists of the owners of fictitious capital, rather than real capital, was more interested in obtaining large capital gains from speculation in those assets than it was in encouraging capital accumulation, especially in large-scale fixed capital in infrastructure, whose returns might be years in the future to materialise.

That is why, today, the lack of planning and regulation, the lack of national investment in infrastructure is the real cause for reservoirs to be running low, and for the potential for power outages in the Winter to be posed, not a few hot days in the Summer, which, in previous years, would have been seen as a boon and nothing out of the ordinary, rather than something we are told to complain about.