Taxpayers fund farmers to wreck their landscape and flood their homes

Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade – the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the ‘satellite’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire or east towards Oxford. You may notice something that is so commonplace in British river systems most people ignore it: the woods, marshes and wetlands are all but gone. Farmers have ploughed fields up to the banks. Because there is nothing – or next to nothing – to soak up the rain, water and silt flows straight off the bare fields into the river and heads downstream.

In a marvellous series of articles for the Guardian, George Monbiot has explained how public money has turned the southern England into a funnel. This morning’s shows his ability to range from hydrology, to economics, to the idiocies of Brussels.