Fieldsports campaigner and farmer Robin Page, once wrote that if you look at the reverse of the coin marked ‘animal lover’, you will generally find the words ‘people hater’ written on the other side. It is hard to say to what extent this applies to Barbara (now Baroness) Young, but farmers and property owners living on the Somerset levels may have good cause to think that to a great extent it does.
It was, wouldn’t you know it, a New Labour decision to hand the running of the Environment Agency to Young, at the time Chief Executive of the RSPB, thereby allowing the then 52 year old to indulge her passion for nature on a national scale with the Somerset levels becoming something of a personal crusade.
Lord Chris Smith (another New Labour relic) may well be currently taking the heat for the recent flooding and justly so, but Smith is actually implementing policies designed by Young. Policies, or at least one of them, famously captured in her observation that she would like to see ‘a limpet mine attached to every pumping station’. She might not have actually said “wildlife first, people second” but that has been the legacy of her time at the Environment Agency, except of course that the resulting prolonged flooding does not do much for wildlife either.
Young pushed off in 2008 to become chairman of the Care Quality Commission, where her inadequacies as a manager of anything will have become abundantly clear to the brutalized residents of some of the nation’s care homes. There will be many questions in the wake of what has taken place in Somerset, but the one that comes so much to mind is: why are we so badly governed?