20 Mar 2014

UK FLOOD NEWS SPIN: The Garden City propaganda begins…

"There is no flood risk on any of the 12 floodplains the Government is developing, the construction industry did not give the Tories £3.5m worth of bribe before the last election, Britain is forging ahead economically, the EU has every right to be in the Ukraine, there were no funny goings on at Elm House, and Leon Brittan is the world’s only Kosher cross-dressing nun."
EbbsGCBy John Ward: I’m grateful to a Slogger for pointing out the disinformation jamboree getting off the ground at the website above.As you can see, using the ingenuity that only State spinners can apply – for they maintain the banality that other fears cannot reach – the website is called Ebbsfleet Garden City.
Its lead story-cum-’investigation’ three days ago was ‘Is Ebbsfleet in a flood risk area?’. And astonishingly, the conclusion these happy people reach is ‘no’.
Well, the report by North Kent Environment agents (led by Toby the Trappist Willinson) said in 2009 that it was. And nothing has changed since then – apart from the insertion of 15,000 new houses into the plan.
But the Ebbsfleet Ministry of Truth says that it isn’t a risk at all. This is its support evidence:

‘Bluewater shopping centre is immediately to the west and Ebbsfleet International railway station to the east. When these were planned a flood risk assessment would have also been carried out. There are significant flood defences along the River Thames and there are no main rivers in the Ebbsfleet Garden City development area.’
Just to quickly deconstruct this bollocks, (a) a risk assessment was carried out in 2009 – and it concluded there were ‘severe flood risk consequences’, (b) As the 2009 report shows, the Thames defences are irrelevant, because the problem in Ebbsfleet is groundwater seepage and (c) no area needs flood rivers in it to get flooded…water travels, you bunch of morons. Also point b applies again: the fenlands themselves are artificially maintained by pumps already. I’d call that a flood risk, wouldn’t you?
The ‘About’ section of the site is less than informative. It says, ‘Welcome to the Ebbsfleet Community Information Website. This website has been set up to provide information about the new Ebbsfleet Garden City.’ Who are the ECI? Who did the setting up?
dartwater2Bet you all a fiver it wasn’t the Environment Agency. But while you’re all getting your wallets out, here’s some East Dartfood/Ebbsfleet corridor streets not flooding in 1998:

Anyway, that’s it for the Webbedfeet episode, folks: time to move on. There is no flood risk on any of the 12 floodplains the Government is developing, the construction industry did not give the Tories £3.5m worth of bribe before the last election, Britain is forging ahead economically, the EU has every right to be in the Ukraine, there were no funny goings on at Elm House, and Leon Brittan is the world’s only Kosher cross-dressing nun.

No comments:

Post a Comment