Floods bring people together, but they also wash away trust
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Version 0 of 1. Ever since at least the time of King Canute, and probably long before that, those in authority have had an uneasy relationship with the forces of nature. And with good reason, as this week has once again reminded many parts of Britain. Floods, like the ones that have coursed through so many communities in northern England and southern Scotland this week, have a way of uprooting more things than the cars, trees and bridges that have been the stuff of the week’s television news bulletins. Water can sweep away the metaphysical as well as the physical. It can carry away authority, trust, and some of the certainties of ordered life with them too. And floods are no respecter of reputations either. King Canute understood this. It is not so clear that David Cameron does. Related: ‘Hammering, grim, brainless’ – how Storm Desmond hit Lancaster Floods can destroy political standing irrevocably, as the Hurricane Katrina failures did so devastatingly for George W Bush in 2005 when the Louisiana levees broke. Bush’s reputation in America never really recovered from his complacent failure to empathise sufficiently with the victims. Gordon Brown’s period as prime minister began with a very public display of grasp and command in the face of 2007 flooding in central England. But it proved to be more show than substance, and the lift to his popularity was short-lived. With David Cameron you get the impression that deep down he knows he can’t roll back the waters and is simply making the necessary show of wearing-the-wellies concern that is expected of him. But it’s not simply that the shock of floods appears to create a public demand for leaders to do something, or at least – more realistically – to be seen to do something. More challengingly, floods can sometimes change a mood. They bring people together. They provide a dramatic landscape within which the virtues of stoicism, making the best of a bad job and helping out – qualities that some people associate with the British – come to the fore. Smart politicians should pay more attention to that. Because the implications matter. It would be a wild exaggeration to pretend that a flood washes the sins of the Earth away and leaves behind a changed land and people ready to put their unconditional trust in a bearded prophet from Islington. But it is a fact that the ancients sometimes saw a flood as a collective punishment and a summons to mend our ways. Both the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament describe judgmental floods of this kind. The flood in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie Tulliver drowns is described as sweeping away moral vestures; and Emile Zola uses the flood in the mine in Germinal to create the potent image of the dead body that keeps on floating back to gnaw at the nerves of the hero. While no one would suggest that this week’s floods were any kind of verdict on errant Cumbrians or anyone else, it’s not hard to detect a new energy for thinking more ambitiously about the challenges that the waters have imposed. Occasionally, it is true, the rising waters can divide rather than unite. Many northerners suspect that floods in the south attract more coverage and action than those in the north. And this week some flood victims in the Tyne valley think the Lake District is getting too much of the attention, not least from the cameras that take breathtaking pictures. Even within the Tyne valley, the Guardian’s Helen Pidd reported yesterday a feeling upstream that there was too much focus on historic Corbridge, 10 miles down river. Yet along the Tyne or in the Lakes, the energy and spirit of people in the flooded areas is palpable. That’s true whether it takes the form of the volunteer actions of rescuers and neighbours in flooded Carlisle streets; or the defiant determination of the 70 guests at the “best wedding ever”, who partied on through the rains in the village of Glenridding, on Ullswater, and didn’t want to leave when the waters briefly receded – before returning in the past 48 hours. Everyone who has experienced these recent floods is agreed that emergency services and community spirit in the affected areas have been heroic. And as Ian Martin wrote in the Guardian yesterday from Lancaster, the disaster brought people out into the flooded streets, offering help, buns and hot water – and just checking if they could be of help. “In the end,” as Martin wrote “we are not motorists or customers, we are neighbours.” Nor are people blaming the government for the mess their homes and streets are in, let alone for the rain. But Cameron would be very foolish to conclude that public opinion accepts that the government has done everything that is realistically possible. It is hard to read and listen to the accounts from towns such as Appleby and Keswick in England, or Dumfries and Hawick in Scotland – the border was irrelevant when the waters rose – and not sense the demand for flood defences to be treated as a much higher priority. An almost wartime feeling of “never again” is once again the popular mood in these places, where the floods have now come once too often for comfort. Just as the land is saturated with water, so is public tolerance about floods. Related: Drip, drip, drip, by day and night Britain could be one storm away from the local resilience and pride displayed this week morphing into a wider impatience. It sounds to me as though people are saying that they have done their bit, and done it willingly – done it even to prove a point about the north against the “soft south”; but they are also saying that the government needs to do the things that local people themselves cannot do. As so often with other issues, the prime minister and the chancellor appear to hear the surface of the message, to which they offer quick and sympathetic responses, but not to feel its pressing inner force. Osborne needs to translate his rhetoric about being a builder into capital investment in flood defences and other strategies for littoral communities and vulnerable assets such as the coastal railway lines along Morecambe Bay. If January 2016 turns out the way January 2014 did, when the floods in Somerset and the Severn and Thames valleys brought life to a standstill across parts of southern England, then the popular demand for major strategic infrastructure investment in defences that only the state can provide could become a defining moment. If I were the prime minister, I would fast-track flood defences ahead of HS2, the high-speed London-Birmingham railway line, in my list of infrastructural priorities, and I would say: “These are the people’s priorities – I get it.” What was it the Bard said? There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / is bound in shallows and in miseries. Cameron should take it at the flood. |