EU policy to keep UK short of water to train people for global warming droughts

5/12/12, "Keeping the country short of water is now government – and EU – policy," UK Telegraph, C. Booker

"The great (UK) water shambles, as we know, centres on two major failings of national policy. One is the water companies’ failure to plug the leaks that are costing us nearly as much water every two years as is contained in all our reservoirs. The other is their failure to add to that reservoir capacity, which has barely increased in the 20 years since water was privatised, despite our 10 per cent growth in population....

Astonishingly, it now emerges, it has become quite deliberate government policy to keep Britain short of water. And the explanation for this baffling volte-face lies in a “Communication” issued in 2007 by the European Commission (COM (2007) 414 Final) “addressing the challenge of water scarcity and droughts in the European Union”.

This document was based on the belief that Europe was facing a water crisis due to global warming. The only way to meet the prospect of severe droughts, it argued, was to encourage us all to use water much more “efficiently”. Not once in this 14-page document is there any mention of the need to improve the storage of water. From now on, the policy of member states must be, by every possible means, to reduce the use of water, not least by making it more expensive. This is the policy that our government has now adopted, as was confirmed last year by Mrs Spelman’s

• White Paper, Water for Life.

In all its 105 pages, there are plenty of mentions of climate change and the need to conserve water in face of the predicted droughts. As Mrs Spelman put it, when rivers start to run dry and cracks appear in those empty reservoirs, “we must recognise these as warning signs of what we might expect to see in a changing climate”. But not once, as in the EU’s paper, is there any mention of a need to build new reservoirs. The only message is that we must learn to conserve this “precious resource”, not least by making us pay more for it.

Herein, it seems, lies the explanation for our current utterly bizarre plight, wherein Mrs Spelman pronounces that there is “no immediate need” for new reservoirs, and Ofwat tells water companies, as it did last week, that there is no need for them to fix those leaks before 2015.

If the people of Britain, not least the 20 million in the South East still under a hosepipe ban, were aware that this was being brought about by a quite deliberate policy, backed by the crackpot projections of our climate change-obsessed Met Office, they would be very angry indeed. But so far, Mrs Spelman has been remarkably successful in hiding from us just

• what a dirty and nonsensical game she is playing."...

via Tom Nelson