Do all the issues with climate change come down to class? Elaine Graham-Leigh takes a look

Weather, as we know, is not climate. It’s very difficult to point to any particular weather event, no matter how dramatic, and state with confidence that it was the result of climate change. When both Lord Stern and a Met Office spokesperson do this about this winter’s rain and storms, it’s therefore an indication that we should sit up and take notice.

Climate scientists have been warning for some time that a warmer world is likely to be a world in which previously rare extremes of weather are commonplace. Paradoxical as it may seem, the extreme cold in the US and Canada this winter is as much a result of global warming as last summer’s heatwave, and is part of the same weather pattern which has given southern England the wettest December and January in 248 years.

This winter’s storms are a reminder of how important it is that we get real, urgent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, but they also remind us that the effects of climate change aren’t only a concern in poor countries, far away. In some ways, on a fortunately much less destructive scale, this is a repeat of the wake-up call delivered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when New Orleans and much of the Gulf coast of the US was flooded and nearly 2,000 people died. It is also, like Katrina, a demonstration of how neo-liberalism is terrible at preparing for and dealing with natural disasters.

The flooding in the south of England has revealed a key flaw in the austerity agenda: if you cut people’s jobs in the public sector, then the work those people were doing won’t get done. The Con-Dem version is that all public sector workplaces are bloated with people doing very little, and that cuts are merely removing the useless fat. The fact that the government has responded to the flooding by putting the redundancy programme at the Environment Agency on hold tells us that this is a lie and they know it. When it came to it, the bad publicity may have been too hard for the government to take, but the reality is that from a neo-liberal perspective, what is important is the cuts to public spending. If public sector services get worse as a result, that’s immaterial compared to the need to shrink the state. It’s small wonder that people in the Somerset Levels and along the Thames have felt abandoned, and that locals in Wraysbury were angry enough with the government that the Environment Agency had, briefly, to get out of town.

Austerity

The austerity agenda is all about abandoning co-ordinated planning of services as they are handed over piecemeal to the private sector and what we have seen over the last few weeks, as the waters rose and rain kept coming down, is what that atomised, market-based approach looks like for flood management. It’s an approach in which you don’t have planned flood alleviation schemes, looking at the best way of dealing with flood risk across wide areas. You have emergency defences which protect some homes but abandon others, like the aqua dam installed in Chertsey to hold back the Thames, and those who have the resources building flood defences for their own property alone. The role of the government here is limited to lobbying the insurance industry so that they don’t abandon flood cover; managing flood risk is no longer a collective responsibility but something which individuals have to manage for themselves with the private sector. The logical conclusion of this approach of course is the US government’s response to Hurricane Katrina: warn people in the area that the storm is coming, but take no action to help those who don’t have the resources actually to get out of the way.

In the absence of a collective flood management policy, any debate about flooding becomes a fight between competing interests for who can persuade the government that they need to be protected even at the expense of everyone else. So for example we’ve seen arguments from the farming sector that farmland shouldn’t be flooded to save keep houses dry, and accusations that flooding in Somerset is the result of lobbying by ‘conservationists’ to create wetlands for the sake of biodiversity, rather than dredging to protect farmland. What these fights leave out is that in many areas, flooding is a class issue. Greenfield sites in flood plains are attractive to developers because they tend to be easier and cheaper to build on than more elevated spots, so it is often the newer, cheaper housing (if any housing in southern England can be classed as cheap) which is most at risk from the rising waters. In many places, living high enough above the local river is a dream which not everyone can afford.

The poorest victims of flooding are of course least likely to be able to afford to insure against it and the government’s Flood Re insurance scheme does little for the least affluent. The scheme, dreamt up last year and due to come in to force in 2015, is essentially the government’s attempt to persuade the insurance industry not to cut vast swathes of the country off from flood cover by establishing a central pot for payment of flood claims and capping individual premiums. Most of the press coverage has centred on the fact that the most expensive properties in flood-prone areas aren’t included, but we may feel that those who can afford to live in the highest council tax band are more likely than not to be able to afford their insurance premiums anyway. Mentioned less often is the fact that leasehold properties – i.e. the vast majority of flats – aren’t included either. Nor are buy-to-let properties, so tenants face being made homeless if their homes are flooded and their landlord turns out not to have insurance cover to make repairs and pay for alternative accommodation.

Living with climate change

Climate change will make extreme weather like this winter’s rain more common and the reality is that even if we were able to slash greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, we would have to find ways of living with what has already been emitted. It is possible to imagine some of these: there are suggestions for how a different, more mobile style of living could enable communities to live with environmental changes as diverse as increased wildfire risk in Australia and Tasmania to coastal erosion in Norfolk, but they require collective planning and response to natural disasters, not an individual, market-based approach in which everyone is responsible for defending their own property, and only their own property, from the elements.

It is worth remembering that some of the most flood-prone areas in the south of England are in their present forms creations of capitalism, shaped by the need to extract profits from the land. The Somerset Levels, like the Fens in the east of England, were (after some initial draining by the Cistercian monastic order, themselves not adverse to expelling peasants from lands around their abbeys, in the twelfth century) subject to attempts at drainage in the seventeenth century by ‘gentlemen adventurers’, early capitalists, who wanted to make valuable cropland out of the waterlogged areas. It wasn’t altogether successful, but the process of drainage was completed in the nineteenth century as part of the enclosure.

What these two stages of drainage have in common is that they involved removing the land from the people who lived there for the benefit of the drainers and the landowners. It is for this reason that they met with fierce resistance; in the seventeenth century, the people of the Fens in particular were well known for destroying the dykes in attempts to stop the drainage. The point is not that the Levels and the Fens as they are, are somehow ‘unnatural’ and should just be allowed to return to their flooded state. That wouldn’t be very much help for the people who are currently flooded out. It is however true that people managed to live with flooding on the Levels for hundreds if not thousands of years, until the needs of capitalism changed the landscape and turned those people off. It is an indication that collective solutions to dealing with a higher risk of flooding should not be impossible to find.

The reality of climate change means that we have two tasks, to stop further climate change and to fight for ways of dealing with the effects of the changed climate we already have in a way which doesn’t simply condemn those who can’t buy their way out. For all David Cameron’s green posturing before the last election (they were going to be the greenest government on record, remember that?), the Tory party has long been the natural home of the climate change denier. Any government which appoints someone who has distinct climate change denial leanings as environment secretary (Owen Paterson) is always going to be weak on environmental issues. It isn’t simply a Tory problem, however. Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Lord Stern issued his report on the economic costs of climate change in 2006; wake up calls for which successive governments have persisted in hitting the snooze button. There is the wider question of why action on climate change is so hard to achieve.

Climate change and class

It is a reasonable assumption that a natural disaster which affects wealthy people in the Home Counties will get more attention than something that affects poorer people elsewhere. When the Levels first flooded, there were complaints that people there were being ignored because what had happened to them wasn’t happening in London. The flooding along the Thames provided an opportunity for some ‘we’re all in this together’ imagery, as a number of news outlets ran pictures of floods near Windsor Castle. This might lead to the conclusion that now that some wealthy people have learnt first-hand that climate change is real, government action will result, but that isn’t how capitalism works.

A key attribute of capitalism is the mobility of capital itself. Unlike under any other mode of production, the power and wealth of the global elite under capitalism isn’t linked to possession of any particular piece of good-quality land. Capitalist elites don’t have to care about the environmental destruction they cause; they can extract all the profit they can and invest in another sector, somewhere else. The City of London is protected from flooding by the Thames Barrier, but there is no natural disaster which could stop the City from working. The Stock Exchange, the companies based in Canary Wharf and surroundings might use particular office buildings but they don’t have to: their data will be backed up in data centres elsewhere in the UK or elsewhere in the world. If the City were covered by a freak flood, it might inconvenience the employees of the City companies, but the companies themselves would implement their disaster recovery plans and keep going.

This is why issues of climate change always come down in the end to questions of class. It is ultimately not in capitalism’s interest to defray any profits to deal with climate change, so we can’t rely on the capitalist class and their political representatives to take action for us. Every battle we fight about flooding – against cuts to flood defence funding, against public sector job cuts, for a guarantee of decent insurance cover for everyone at risk of flooding – is a battle against the logic of capitalism which says that caring about the planet gets in the way of profits.

Public meeting: In deep water: climate chaos and capitalism in austerity Britain