The perils of politicians overseeing disaster plans

Typing with crossed fingers is not easy but I shall persevere in the hope that we are about to see the back of this miserable, wet, windy winter.

By the time this appears, we could have had earthquakes or ten feet of snow – such is the uselessness of Met Office forecasts which last November were predicting a dryer than usual February – but there are three important things to be said on this (weather) front.

One is that, here in the Dales, we have been lucky: plenty of depression but little outright disaster. The second is that there are important lessons to be learned, and, thirdly and hopefully, our political masters might learn them.

On the latter point, I admit to a strictly underwhelming feeling of optimism, because when it comes to national disasters – like the massive flood of South and West England – politicians are, frankly, useless.

For in these days of yah-boo political debate, the first things the politicos do is... call a meeting. Better still, lots and lots of meetings. And the purpose of all his hot air, one suspects, is to ponder how they can best come out of it as shining heroes.

In the meantime, millions of acres of prime land in the West Country were sinking under the waves, not to mention homes and riverside businesses like pubs, shops, restaurants and B&BS, the sort of enterprises which form a crucial sector of the Yorkshire Dales economy.

The flooding in Somerset began just before Christmas. It was February when the boss of the Environment Agency, Lord Smith of Finsbury, deemed to set foot in Somerset, by which time many thousands of acres of land and hundreds of homes and businesses were under water.

Now I single out Lord Smith not because he is a former Labour minister but because of his background. Born and bred in London, he became a local councillor, went into the charity business, and then got elected.

He had absolutely no experience whatsoever of rural life, no contact with farmers or farming, yet he was given control of the agency supposed to ensure the protection and prosperity of our countryside.

And what did he do when he got to soggy Somerset? He refused to apologise saying his agency had done a grand job under the circumstances. It was only when the Thames Valley began to flood in early February that the Prime Minister – whose own constituency was being threatened by the rising waters – called in the army.

Some six weeks had gone by whilst the politicians held their meetings. This brought back memories to me of the last politician-bungled natural disaster that struck here in the Dales, the foot and mouth catastrophe which became public in February, 2001.

And there, too, political leadership – this time under a Labour Government – came under fire.

I spent months covering that disaster and was told, time and time again, that Tony Blair and his cabinet had been informed by Ministry vets of the first outbreaks but they chose to hush it up for two weeks, hoping it could be dealt with locally.

Like now, a general election was looming.

In those two weeks, the movement of infected livestock went on between cattle markets through the country, spreading the disease far and wide, with Cumbria and North Yorkshire the worst hit.

Craven suffered terribly, and not just the farmers. It was one of the busiest periods of my journalistic life – drawing up daily reports of new outbreaks – but also, strangely, one of the most satisfying.

I was co-opted to serve on a special Craven Diocese relief charity set up by Skipton’s Dr Brian Fisher and my non-related namesake John Sheard, the former manager of the Bolton Abbey estate, to raise desperately needed cash for farmers whose stock had not be destroyed – those who had lost their herds were well compensated – but also for hundreds of small businesses whose custom had been slashed when the Government virtually closed down the countryside to visitors.

Those small businesses were exactly the ones that are now being crucified as they clean up the mess left by the floods down South. Because of the huge generosity of Dales folk we raised and spent £1 million in a couple of months. If the Government had shown such speed, tens of thousands of cattle, sheep and pigs would have been saved.

As with the present crisis, the Army were not called in until crisis had become a cataclysm. The soldiers sorted it out with brutal efficiency but – had the politicians chosen not to hush-up impending disaster – the outbreak could have been restricted to relatively few isolated outbreaks.

This is why politicians should never be put in charge of events about which they have absolutely no understanding.

I have had very pleasant dealings with Environment Agency staff who do great work here in the Dales. They, of course, are the foot soldiers who know what they are at. They have been let down by their political leadership and the bureaucracy that politics always spawn.

Let’s hope that, when the next natural disaster arrives as it inevitably will, some of these lessons have been learned.

• Please note, the opinions in this column are John’s alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Craven Herald