John Redwood

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Debating competition

The Wokingham schools have risen magnificently to the challenge of this year’s debating competition.  Debating is good practice for the different kinds of public speaking people get called upon to do in their adult lives.  It is not just MPs and councillors who have to do lots of talking.  Teachers spend their lives passing on knowledge in  oral English.  These days people in business and in large public organisations have to present their thoughts to colleagues and speak to groups of customers, patients and parents.

The students conquered their nerves well and were soon examining each other’s arguments.  In the first round they looked at the difficulty of persuading people to cut their carbon footprint given the importance of carbon producing transport in all our lives.  In the semi-finals they examined just how developing countries can get out of poverty and tried to work out why places like Hong Kong and Singapore have done well, China and India are now making progress, and sub-Sahara Africa remains on under a dollar per person per day. We are all looking forward to the final on Thursday when the two teams will be battling it out on the issue of whether a school should be able to insist on a particular uniform for their sixth formers and whether they should ban religious jewellery.

The rains have come at last this autumn.  I do hope this time the water companies and the water regulator have worked out how to capture enough of the rain to see us through next summer.  It is crazy that we still have drought orders when there is so much water in the  rivers and lying on the land. Water tables are not low everywhere, and there is plenty of surface water to catch and hold.

Indeed, the water companies are now getting letters from me about their failure to keep their drains and ditches clear to avoid  floods on the roads and in some neighbourhoods.  There seems to be a lack of maintenance in some cases and poor design in others making it difficult to get around in the wet weather and giving some people flooded gardens or even living rooms.  It is high time the authorities woke up to the need to manage our water better to keep us dry in winter and to leave us enough water to keep the gardens in good trim in the summer.  It is a very lame excuse to blame the pattern of rainfall.  We get quite enough rain in this country, we just need to control it, store it and use it properly. I will carry on trying to get the government and the industry to take the action that needs to be taken to cope with rising water demand and with flash floods.