I GUESS there are two types of people you don’t want to see when you have been flooded: reporters and politicians. Even those of us whose feet have stayed dry can possibly see that.
The inundation in the south has caused a tremendous amount of news coverage. This is understandable, given the scale of the flooding, but has produced some uncomfortable moments.
On the BBC news, a reporter interviewed a man whose colleague had died in the floods, and the man broke down mid-sentence. This was powerful stuff, but was it good television or intrusive reporting?
Another reporter waded through a front garden and shoved his head into an open window, where a man was disconsolately paddling about in his front room. The reporter asked a question, the man looked at him, shook his head tearfully, and withdrew from view.
Later, the same reporter stood up to his waist and pointed at water reaching three-quarters the way up a front door. “That’s the highest we’re seen,” he said excitedly.
Such moments have led some to coin the phrase “flood porn”, suggesting that the television cameras have dwelt indecently on people’s misery. And there is a fine line somewhere beneath all that water.
Such a story can hardly be ignored, but sometimes the coverage does reach what one can only call saturation point.
One newspaper reporter spotted Princes William and Harry sandbagging in Berkshire and the young royals suggested that he should put down his notebook and help. The job of reporters is to record, not take part. But this incident offered a polite version of an old conundrum: when do you stop being an observer and do something possibly more productive?
As for the politicians, the flood victims have been bombarded.
Natural disasters are political and leaders who are seen not to act quickly enough can be damned, as happened to President George W Bush after a tardy response to Hurricane Katrina.
All the political leaders have been at it here.
PM David Cameron took the lead (understandably enough), while Ukip’s Nigel Farage put on his waders for a glum photo-shoot and Labour leader Ed Miliband used his wellies to announce that climate change was a matter of national security.
The trouble is politics stains everything, much as all that water does when it recedes. So was Miliband, for instance, saying something useful or using other people’s discomfort as a platform for point-scoring oratory?
Many people have observed that the Government only started to act when the floods reached closer to London and into classic Conservative territory. A quote trending, as they say, on Twitter had it that the Coalition only moved when “the effluent hit the affluent”.
Another political aspect bobbed up when Cameron said, “Money is no object” in helping flood victims. As the Coalition government has in essence been almost wholly concerned with arguing that austerity is unavoidable, what was the Prime Minister doing by suggesting that the money is limitless when the need is there? If the Coalition can find money when it has to, even with its belt so tight, doesn’t that undermine some of the cuts and austerity, suggesting that money is available for the “right” cause and that the old-fashioned State does have a role after all?
Others in the Government hurried to deny the existence of a “blank cheque”, but those kind words from Cameron have punched a hole in the Coalition’s penny-pinching philosophy.
Flooding is political in a different sense, too. In arguments about to what extent this is a natural disaster or one caused or worsened by man; and in arguments about the contribution made by a seemingly unstable climate.
The increasingly ranty Nigel Lawson, patron saint of climate sceptics everywhere, isn’t having any of it, as usual; and it is worth remembering that Lawson still has influence over the Tories.
And behind and beyond everything is the simple, sad truth that sometimes flooding happens, and if you live close to water, you might get wet – a miserable experience, but not an unexpected one.
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