The brutal truth about the floods

How should the government respond to some of the worst floods this country has ever seen? With more spending on defences, scrapping plans to build new houses on floodplains, or by making us face up to the need for greener lifestyles?

Maybe we really are entering a period of government with no PR spin, said Mark Steel in The Independent. No image-conscious person would ever propose building 20,000 houses on flood plains during one of the country's worst-ever floods. Housing minister Yvette Cooper tried to justify this by saying that the Romans built York on a flood plain, but should we being taking advice from the Romans? "They built a city at the bottom of Mount Vesuvius and look what happened to that."

The Government's whole response to the floods has been off-beam, says The Guardian's Jackie Ashley. Brown and his ministers have discussed the Environment Agency's budget, flood planning and where new houses should be built, when they should have seized this opportunity to state plainly that these floods are a further example of "what lies ahead for us, time and again, if we don't change our ways". Climate change means more extreme weather events and the "brutal truth" is that however good our flood defences, transport planning and emergency relief are, we must face the fact that failure to alter our economy and lifestyles in response is "simply idiotic". The British public's reaction is to jet off to the Mediterranean in search of the sun; we need to be "cajoled, led, provoked and taxed" into changing our ways. Our Government's focus on the long-term carbon offsetting, recycling and green transport is precisely the problem, says The Observer. What we need is a clear strategy to prepare us for the imminent threat posed by a "much wetter future".

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