The Department of the Environment produced a plan for management of the River Parrett area in 2008.
Its central policy is encapsulated in the following extract.
'Policy appraisal
We and our partners have developed policies to manage flood risk in the future. These policies set out our vision for a more sustainable, cost effective and natural approach to managing flood risk in our catchments. These policies are:
1. No active intervention (including flood warning and maintenance). Continue to monitor and advise.
2. Reduce existing flood risk management actions (accepting that flood risk will increase over time).
3. Continue with existing or alternative actions to manage flood risk at the current level of flooding (accepting that flood risk will increase over time from this baseline).
4. Take further action to sustain current scale of flood risk into the future (responding to the potential increases in flood risk from urban development, land use change, and climate change).
5. Take further action to reduce flood risk (now and/or in the future).
6. Take action to increase the frequency of flooding to deliver benefits locally or elsewhere, (which may constitute an overall flood risk reduction, e.g. for habitat inundation). Note: This policy option involves a strategic increase in flooding in allocated areas, but is not intended to adversely affect the risk to individual properties'
It seems from this that they accept flooding and welcome it. This fits in with their repetition throughout the document of their support for various wildlife agencies and that their policy is based on directives from the EU.
http://www.tauntondeane.gov.uk/irj/go/k ... 20Plan.pdfI believe they were also instrumental in the deliberate flooding of farmlands in East Anglia where they allowed they destroyed sea defences so that the farmland could be returned to its 'natural' state where birds could thrive.
They also object to the building of coastal defences in parts of Yorkshire and other areas on the grounds that it is not natural to fight the sea. I'm not sure what the Dutch would make of that one.
The idea that the Somerset levels have been deliberately flooded on EU orders is proposed on this site which has links to the various statements and directives coming out of Strasbourg and other such places.
http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84683I think that when local people could manage their area to the best of their ability they knew what they were doing in terms of agriculture, fishing and whatever else was important to them in their local economy. With power over localities being transferred hundreds of miles away to government bureaucrats and even further away to Europeans, the realities of day to day living and coping with the landscape and environment have been lost.
Anyway whether it is a 'right' versus 'left' debate whatever that means is irrelevant. I believe those terms originated in the French Court to describe those who were in favour and sat to the right of the king and those who were not in favour and who sat to the left of the king.
Here is a policy document from the people who produced it. It has not been filtered through left or right leaning third party brain cells.