So the UK is finished says Theresa Mayhem

[P.K.]

7 minutes ago, Freggyragh said:

Dredging doesn’t prevent flooding. Clearing obstructions is useful, but if you dig a deeper channel you deliver a larger quantity of water to flooded area faster. Your point about building on flood plains is correct, but you should also include irrigated grouse moors (which successive U.K. governments have subsided), single crop farming (usually barley to feed the huge whisky export business) and road building. To prevent flooding you need flood plains, with as many layers of vegetation, particularly trees, as possible, to soak up the water and slow down the flow. If your going to concrete over or plough land in one area and prevent the land from soaking up rainfall, then you need to manage and extend flood plains elsewhere. Dredging anywhere except harbour mouths is just creating worse trouble downstream.

Your post is all nonsense.

It's ALL down to immigrants, especially the illegals, as this post makes clear:

3 hours ago, Rog said:

Immigrants?  The UK and particularly England is over full and being made worse by immigrants and illegals.  Our infrastructure is collapsing and we're having to build houses where houses just shouldn't be built out of desperation to house what in so many cases should be kicked out.

Now who could argue with that except anyone normal...?

[TheTeapot]

16 minutes ago, Freggyragh said:

Dredging doesn’t prevent flooding. Clearing obstructions is useful, but if you dig a deeper channel you deliver a larger quantity of water to flooded area faster. Your point about building on flood plains is correct, but you should also include irrigated grouse moors (which successive U.K. governments have subsided), single crop farming (usually barley to feed the huge whisky export business) and road building. To prevent flooding you need flood plains, with as many layers of vegetation, particularly trees, as possible, to soak up the water and slow down the flow. If your going to concrete over or plough land in one area and prevent the land from soaking up rainfall, then you need to manage and extend flood plains elsewhere. Dredging anywhere except harbour mouths is just creating worse trouble downstream.

Single crop farming is a huge problem. The somerset floods of 5(?) years ago were largely a consequence of growing sweetcorn everywhere. 

[quilp]

There is certainly a debate to be had about dredging. The NFU, in 2014, wrote to the then environment minister, Owen Patterson, to reintroduce river maintenance, which was restricted by an EU directive, in 2000. This was during the flooding which occurred that year which swamped 170,000 acres of farmland in Somerset. The farmers there said that flooding had worsened since maintenance was stopped. The banks and rivers were clogged-up 42% which led to a vast reduction in the transit of water. An excuse given by the Agency was that they didn't any longer have the personnel to carry out the work. Possibly because they'd been laid off due to the EU directive, 14 years earlier.

Dredging may not prevent flooding but there's plenty of professional opinion which would say it helps, especially in the estuaries and gates further upstream.

Common practice in the States and other countries elsewhere.

 

Edited February 21, 2020 by quilp

[woolley]

4 hours ago, Rog said:

Wrong.  Eu environmental rules have prevented dredging of waterways in the way and to the extent to which had been taking place for many decades.  Add to that the restrictions on silt disposal and there is a recipe for disaster.  Now throw in the pressure on the housing stock made even worse as a result of all but wide open borders not to mention illegals and house building on known flood planes ---.

 

3 hours ago, P.K. said:

I would very much like to see proof of that statement Roger as a detriment that might bring on flooding.

 

3 hours ago, Rog said:

Just plug "EU FARCE: Brussels rules have exposed Britain's flood defences – REVEALED" into Google for one source.

 

2 hours ago, John Wright said:

But they haven’t. The sources you suggest we google search are just anti EU Brexit pushing fake news sites. Dredging of rivers, canals, streams, watercourses, drains, etc, goes on all over the EU.

Any slowdown here is through U.K. central and local government + environment agency choice and through a decade of lack of funding/austerity cuts down to the Tories.

 

2 hours ago, Rog said:

the almost complete cessation of dredging of our rivers since we were required to accept the European Water Framework Directive (EWF) into UK law in 2000 that has had such an awful knock on effect.

 

1 hour ago, sir nige said:

 if its getting spent in the right areas or how eu regs are applied is another matter.....

 

1 hour ago, John Wright said:

Link thingy. 

It's a mixture of factors. Not so much underspending but spending on the wrong things. Building on floodplains, yes, but also very poor husbandry of the land further upstream by Government scientists who should know better, and.......... the European Union Common Agricultural Policy which takes our taxes and gives us a very small proportion back to spend on policies that are flooding our land. It is multi-faceted, multi-layered dire management. Don't take it from me. Read this very interesting article in PK's Grauniad by George Monbiot.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/13/flooding-public-spending-britain-europe-policies-homes

For – and here we start to approach the nub of the problem – there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment – by the far biggest component of farm subsidies – that land has to be free from what it calls “unwanted vegetation”(10). Land covered by trees is not eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills.

Just as the tree planting grants have stopped, the land clearing grants have risen. In his speech to the Oxford Farming Conference, made during the height of the floods, the environment secretary Owen Paterson boasted that hill farmers “on the least-productive land” will now receive “the same direct payment rate on their upland farmland as their lowland counterparts.”(11) In other words, even in places where farming makes no sense because the land is so poor, farmers will now be paid more money to keep animals there. But to receive this money, they must first remove the trees and scrub that absorb the water falling on the hills.

And that’s just the start of it. One result of the latest round of subsidy negotiations – concluded in June last year – is that governments can now raise the special mountain payments, whose purpose is to encourage farming at the top of the watersheds, from €250 per hectare to €450(12). This money should be renamed the flooding subsidy: it pays for the wreckage of homes, the evacuation of entire settlements, the drowning of people who don’t get away in time, all over Europe. Pig-headed idiocy doesn’t begin to describe it.

The problem is not confined to livestock in the mountains. In the foothills and lowlands, the misuse of heavy machinery, overstocking with animals and other forms of bad management can – by compacting the soil – increase the rates of instant run-off from 2% of all the rain that falls on the land to 60%(13).

 

[woolley]

15 minutes ago, TheTeapot said:

Single crop farming is a huge problem. The somerset floods of 5(?) years ago were largely a consequence of growing sweetcorn everywhere. 

Indeed!

[quilp]

George Monbiot the big game hunter? 

[quilp]

Euronews, much discussion taking place...

 

[quilp]

Oh, er, hang on, what's this..? 

 

[quilp]

Don't know if anyone watched QT last night but one woman's opinion hurt and offended the deplorable guardianista, Owen Jones, had him pissing down his leg and demanding the BBC should've edited her out, with claims our national broadcaster was promoting and normalising "racism."

Typical woke. Piss-poor whining and finger-pointing labelism, as usual and attempting to curtail free speech that he and his ilk doesn't like.

That's it. To end racism, shut these people down lest their opinions influence the masses and bring chaos and anarchy.

Every time that boy opens his pouty little gob he commits social suicide, imo...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/21/normalise-bbc-racism-hate-crimes-question-time

 

Edited February 21, 2020 by quilp
Come to think of it where is Good Morning Britten of late?

[woolley]

30 minutes ago, quilp said:

Oh, er, hang on, what's this..? 

 

Strange all of this talk of austerity since 2010. There was hardly a dent in the spending at any time. So much waste.

ETA: Anyone expecting interest rates to rise anytime soon - don't!

Edited February 21, 2020 by woolley

[TheTeapot]

This will cheer PK up no end

UK post-Brexit blue passports made in Polish factory

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/uk-post-brexit-blue-passports-made-in-polish-factory-gh5jthw9h (paywalled)

Quote

Britain’s new post-Brexit blue passports will be given to applicants from next month, the Home Office announced yesterday.

What it did not say, however, was that they will be made by a Franco/Dutch company at a factory in Poland, under EU procurement rules.

In one of the ironies of Brexit, the 11-year, £260 million contract was won by a subsidiary of the French multinational group Thales last year, after its British competitor De La Rue lost out.

As a result all the new passports will be made at the company’s factory in the Polish town of Tczew and then imported into the UK. At the time the contract was signed, the government said it would create 70 new jobs in Britain.

Ministers hailed the introduction of the new passports yesterday as a “unique opportunity to restore our national identity” after Brexit. Priti Patel, the home secretary, said: “By returning to the iconic blue and gold design, the British passport will once again be entwined with our national identity and I cannot wait to travel on one. Leaving the European Union gave us a unique opportunity to restore our national identity and forge a new path in the world.”

 

[woolley]

38 minutes ago, TheTeapot said:

This will cheer PK up no end

Well it does say under EU procurement rules, I suppose. Once free of those a judgment has to be made as to whether the cost of buying British is justified by the benefits to employment and balance of payments. Sometimes it will and sometimes it won't but at least you have a choice. 

ETA: One does have to wonder why an 11 year contract. Surely that can only be some EU besotted Whitehall shirts trying to cause embarrassment and bring Brexit into disrepute. What other explanation could there be?

Edited February 22, 2020 by woolley

[John Wright]

10 hours ago, woolley said:

Strange all of this talk of austerity since 2010. There was hardly a dent in the spending at any time. So much waste.

ETA: Anyone expecting interest rates to rise anytime soon - don't!

There has been a spending cut for frontline and social services, affecting the very vulnerable. Bizarrely, at a time of high deficit, 2010, revenue was cut by reducing taxation for the haves.

Thats why the deficit has grown for 10 years and, under Boris, will now balloon as he spends huge sums on vanity projects whilst not restoring in full, or at all, the cuts to service funding.

[woolley]

40 minutes ago, John Wright said:

There has been a spending cut for frontline and social services, affecting the very vulnerable. Bizarrely, at a time of high deficit, 2010, revenue was cut by reducing taxation for the haves.

Thats why the deficit has grown for 10 years and, under Boris, will now balloon as he spends huge sums on vanity projects whilst not restoring in full, or at all, the cuts to service funding.

I have no idea what Boris and his henchmen have planned. One thing is certain though. They need to be working hard to keep their new found converts in the north sweet, because if they don't it's hard to see where they will find support to win a majority next time. 

[ballaughbiker]

Quote

Don't know if anyone watched QT last night but one woman's opinion hurt and offended the deplorable guardianista, Owen Jones, had him pissing down his leg and demanding the BBC should've edited her out, with claims our national broadcaster was promoting and normalising "racism."

Typical woke. Piss-poor whining and finger-pointing labelism, as usual and attempting to curtail free speech that he and his ilk doesn't like.

Is this blondie who has since been outed as an alleged EDL sympathiser and may have been been (re)'selected' for another QT 'audience' less than a year ago by Alison Fuller Pedley ?

It's been obvious to me for some time that audiences for QT were specially selected (and pre-on air rehearsed) but Mentorn Media are coming under ever closer scrutiny now.

No wonder the BBC is loosing credibility by the day. Ask yourself why Blondie is still apoplectic having got what she wanted..... 

 

Update : Blondie is believed to be Sherri B (surname now changed by marriage to P). who allegedly stood as a NF candidate in a NE London constituency in a general election.

Now... was she selected by Pedley* apparently for her imo unenviable CV and did she get seated on the front row by accident?  Who put a clip of the QT rant put on SM? Questions Questions about Question Time.

 

I think an enquiry might be in order.

Edited February 23, 2020 by ballaughbiker
Update