Somewhere between 0.0 and -10, I reckon, based on my inability to even manage my postage-stamp sized garden. I suspect the 'Memsahib' would put it even lower! Thus, I am hardly in a position to say anything very meaningful on the floods that continue to inundate the Somerest Levels. However, I can guide you to the words of a man who should know quite a lot because he owns a Somerset farm, in fact, the farm on which the Glastonbury Festival is staged each year. In today's Mail he makes clear his withering contempt for the so-called Environment Agency which he accuses of being overly influenced by the worst sort of loony Greenies, that is, the ones whose ignorance is only exceeded by their fanaticism - those are my words, rather than those of Mr. Michael Eavis, the landowner in question. He puts it this way:
Honestly, the temptation to say, ‘We told you so’ is just about overwhelming, because those clowns at the Environment Agency certainly can’t say they weren’t warned.
We told them the Somerset Levels, or Moors as we locals call them, would flood again unless they restarted dredging the rivers 12 months ago, when the Moors were flooded by last winter’s heavy rain.
And we told them again, four months ago, when I helped launch a fund to raise the £4million needed to get dredging under way.
But the Environment Agency, increasingly influenced by the worst sort of Greenie 'groupuscles', as exemplified by that malignant organisation, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, had other, higher priorities.
Very soon, conservationists, naturalists and organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds were the good guys and we farmers were the enemy.
As a result, the dredging was stopped and the money saved was diverted into conservation.
My estimate is that over the last two decades, the Environment Agency and related bodies have spent £40million on projects to encourage birds and other forms of wildlife on the Moors.
And now we’re seeing the consequences of those actions.
For more than 15 years, the rivers have been silting up and their flow rates have been falling – water- carrying capacity on the Tone and Parrett, for example, is said to be down by between a third and two thirds.
That’s a massive reduction and the result is inevitable.
Well, at least that swan looks happy, or happier than the people in the car at any rate!
Almost everything these Greenies get involved in is either mistaken, muddled, ignorant, useless or harmful. So why, oh why, does anyone take the slightest notice of what these buffoons screech about?
