EU Referendum


The enemy within


03/05/2012



McDonald.jpg

"It is two successive winters with very low rainfall which have put all of southern England and the Midlands into official drought status, involving hosepipe bans, and for all April's rain, a third dry winter cannot be ruled out", says the Independent.

To expand on the doomsday scenario, the paper enlists a BBC favourite, Adrian McDonald, professor of environmental management at the University of Leeds.

"I don't think we've ever worked out the consequences of three dry winters in a row," McDonald says. "But you would be expecting measures to try and conserve water that would be quite dramatic. There would be standpipes in the streets, and people's water supply would be cut off. We don't know the numbers of people who would be involved, but it could be tens of thousands, easily".

This is a man funded to study "potable water demand forecasting and household forecasting in the UK", so if there is a management plan to deal; with this eventuality, you would expect McDonald to know about it.

Strangely, then, he volunteers the observation that there seems to be "no proper plan" in place to deal with such a possibility. "As far as I'm aware", he says, "there is no strategic national plan to deal with three dry winters in row. I'd like to be proven wrong. I'd like to think we had a plan to deal with it".

Of course, we did have a plan, which was devised in 2004. It involved building five new reservoirs and extending three more. And up to 2008, it was still the preferred option with the water companies.

You would have thought that such a plan might have got a mention from McDonald, if only to mourn its passing. But he offers not a word about it. Nor does he mention the EU plan – which is to spread alarm and despondency about water shortages, as part of a strategy to force up prices and thereby reduce consumption.

But then, when you look at McDonald's sources of funding, and the amount of EU money involved, there is no way he is going to spill the beans on the plan. As far as the EU goes, Leeds University is bought and paid for.

And that is part of our problem. When the media want supposedly independent comment, they go to the universities, but these are working for the enemy. They will not give a fair, honest or even balanced appraisal as they are part of the policy-making machine that serves the EU.

Thus do we have EU policy taking over and no-one is going to mention it. But all you have to do is follow the money, and the evidence is there: in our universities and halls of academe, we have the enemy within.

COMMENT: "ELEPHANTS IN THE WATER" THREAD