There are pandemic echoes in the latest weather panic

There’s a sense of déjà vu in the latest weather warnings, or rather in the condescending advice to the public.

Intense heat and no rain in swathes of the country have brought fire scares on top of the water shortages.

With headlines such as “Exceptional risk of wildfires” and “Drought to be declared“, we are reaching peak panic this weekend over the summer’s climate extremes.

But the feeling that we’ve been here before, quite recently, is not linked so much to the heatwave back in July, but to 2020 and 2021, and lockdown mania.

As temperatures in the high thirties are expected today and tomorrow, much of southern England is on wildfire alert.

Police are planning to step up patrols to look out for people lighting fires or having barbecues – some supermarkets have stopped selling the disposable versions (they’ll be back on the shelves when the rain returns), firework displays have been cancelled, and a golf club in Leighton Buzzard has reportedly barred smoking on its grounds.

Meanwhile, to conserve water supplies, more water companies – including Thames Water, which supplies 15 million customers in London and the south east – are to follow Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Sussex and Kent, in announcing hosepipe bans.

Those found flouting the rules could face fines of up to £1,000 and water companies have urged neighbours to inform on each other, in the national interest, of course.

The Liberal Democrats have even called for the government to appoint a drought minister – as happened in the 1976 heatwave – and stage weekly televised press conferences to tell the public how to limit water use. Sound familiar?

Although some precautions are justified when there are out of the ordinary weather events, there are echoes of lockdown overkill in much of this reaction.

There is also a tendency, last seen during the pandemic, to blame the public for every untoward eventuality, when smarter governance and more careful management – especially by the privatised water firms – would have left the country better prepared.

The lockdowns largely saw public compliance with the unprecedented removal of freedoms, and a weary acceptance of bullying tactics by, among others, inept ministers, preaching public health officials and over-zealous police forces.

Then, as now, people were encouraged to snitch on those who broke the rules. Then it was reporting illicit social gatherings, now it is peering over the garden fence to see if next door’s lawn is being watered.

Interestingly, a survey, commissioned by Clearitwaste.co.uk, revealed that Londoners are the least likely to grass on their neighbours (only 5.92 per cent), while Scots are the most likely (32.11 per cent) – which makes me glad to be in my London suburb now and not in Scotland, where I endured the Covid curbs.

The “do as we say not as we do” approach of lockdown – when it transpired that the very authorities who commanded obedience, from the Prime Minister, to his special advisers, to favoured modellers, failed to observe the regulations themselves – prevails once again.

It is particularly galling when water bosses who preside over collapsing infrastructure, while lapping up generous remuneration, demand sacrifices of their customers.

Thames Water’s strategy and regulatory affairs director, Cathryn Ross, conceded on the Today programme that her organisation could have done more to prevent leaks of around 600 million litres a day, but she still admonished Britons for using more water than Danes or Germans.

This is the same water firm that last week managed to lose five million litres when a burst water main flooded much of Islington – just after its customers were told to take shorter showers.

And it was Thames Water that reportedly paid top staff around £5 million in bonuses, while failing to open a desalination plant that could have delivered up to 100 million litres of water a day during droughts.

The problem is not so much consumers, or the weather, as corporate incompetence. Where reservoirs have been built and maintained – the Kielder in Northumbria, for example – water supplies are not running dry.

On the whole, people can be trusted to ration their water and not splurge scant resources – as the water companies do.

And homeowners most at risk from wildfires should be left to judge how best to protect their properties and when to douse their gardens with water, from hosepipes if necessary.

We don’t need daft diktats about sharing baths or washing ourselves with damp towels. And we don’t need to be threatened with fines.

If we learnt anything from the pandemic it was that micro-managing public behaviour does more harm than good.

Instead of crippling the economy, putting all but Covid healthcare, including cancer diagnoses, on hold, and withdrawing education from the neediest children, we now know we should have adopted a Swedish style model of individual responsibility and minimum disruption.

The same applies now. Most people wouldn’t light a camp fire in a parched forest or have a barbecue in a bone-dry back garden. And most people wouldn’t waste water on the scale of the water companies. 

So, drought or no drought (rain is forecast for next week), spare us the guilt trip and credit us with a drop of common sense.