That bastion of excellent journalism, the Daily Mail, has come up with an interesting conclusion as to who has been to blame for the terrible floods in the north of England. El Nino? Climate change? Freak weather? No, none of these. It’s foreign people what’s to blame.
You really could not make this up, although someone at the Mail clearly did, but it’s overseas aid that’s the reason why Rochdale, in particular, has been flooded. If only we hadn’t kept our promise to help the very poorest people on earth, we could have spent all that money on “our own people”. This false analogy suggests that it was a straight choice between overseas aid and flood defences at home when nothing could be further from the truth. The real choice was made by the government when they decided that the country would best be served by austerity and austerity could only be achieved by cutting public spending and cutting public spending means, at least in part, cutting spending on flood defences. Confused? You’re supposed to be.
In terms of the country’s expenditure, overseas aid is a pin prick. Imagine what the operation to bomb ISIS in Iraq and now Syria is costing and indeed the vast army of highly paid MOD pen-pushing civil servants employed nominally to back them up. The Mail is doing its usual “let’s let foreign people starve to death” routine with all the compassion they showed before World War Two when Lord Rothermere supported Hitler. They’re exploiting people’s individual and collective tragedies to make a spiteful, xenophobic political point.
We also know that whilst being a Tory-supporting newspaper, the Mail doesn’t like Cameron whom it sees as some soggy, left-leaning liberal, so their agenda goes beyond mere spiteful politics. They have half an eye on the succession. The serialisation of Lord Ashcroft’s pathetic “Pig Gate” book was clear evidence of where the Mail’s real agenda lies. And if they really think that Cameron, is of the left, then how much have they really changed since the 1930s? It seems to me they must have moved even further to the right.
In any event, the Mail forgets Cameron’s “money is no object” promise to flood victims and that there was free money available after all. I only wish Cameron himself had known about this free money when he and his chancellor, aided and abetted by Clegg’s Liberals, decided to start slashing flood defence spending from 2010 onwards.
What a murky world of politics we inhabit. It’s just a game to the Mail, it’s all about power to the politicians and in the mean time those poor people seeing their lives, homes and businesses wrecked before their eyes and just watch and shake their heads in disbelief. It’s not the very poorest people in the world who are to blame for the cuts to flood defences. It’s governments who choose to do that and this one had the full support of the Mail when it mattered.
