James Collett, South West Socialist Party
Following weeks of wet weather, across Britain people’s homes have been flooded, crops are in danger of rotting in fields underneath the floodwater, transport infrastructure has been damaged and even graveyards have been flooded.
The Met Office estimates that at current levels of global warming, very wet winters like 2023-24 have gone from being once in 80-year events to once in 20. And with further warming this could become even more frequent.
Flood defences
The bosses’ capitalist system puts profits above all else, including preventing climate catastrophe. And these same priorities are applied to flood defence: decisions come down to the value of what is being protected vs the cost of protecting it. It’s no wonder that working-class people again and again find that their homes are left vulnerable to flooding. The ruling class doesn’t care about us – for them, value is measured in money, not our quality of life. Decisions about where to build houses, often on flood plains, aren’t made democratically by the people that live there but by unelected, unaccountable penny pinchers.
In the upcoming May elections we need workers’ candidates standing up for our interests, not the interests of the super-rich and their crumbling system. Candidates that, if elected, would vote against all cuts to jobs and services, instead putting forward people’s budgets that are based on the needs of working-class communities. That includes flood defences and environmental protections decided by us, not by big business and their politicians. Elected committees of workers and local residents could decide democratically what is needed in their communities to protect housing and infrastructure from flooding, as well as environmental measures that create jobs.
This has to be linked to building mass campaigns to force central government to fully fund local authorities, and to the fight for socialism: for a democratic plan of production nationally and internationally to sustainably produce what’s needed. This can only be done by taking big businesses into public ownership, under workers’ control and management, so that we control what’s produced and how it’s produced.
