Well it seems that having seen a dry riverbed in some exotic country to the East, Jeremy Clarkson has suffered some sort of damascene conversion and become a believer in climate change. Does that mean he will be gluing himself to picture windows next time the Extinction Rebellion clowns decide to close down major cities I wonder?

Of course the climate changes and always has. This world has seen times of excessive heat and times of excessive cold but it has always coped. Now it appears to be struggling but that is because there are far too many people and because there are not enough jobs to go around, a veritable army of bureaucratic paper shufflers has been created and they are exacerbating the problems of a changing climate.

Take the scenes we see in this country year after year when countless homes are ruined due to flooding. Firstly, the demand for the building of ever more homes to house the ever expanding population means that these homes are built in low lying areas and with the building of every single home, natural drainage disappears and the risk of further floods multiplies.

And of course all British rivers and flood plains are now ‘managed’ by one of the said pen pushing armies, grandly known as the Environment Agency.

Every time there is flooding, this vastly over staffed agency defends itself vigorously, but then they would, wouldn’t they? And with their overriding power their defences have been widely published. But surely the majority of these floods could be avoided with a little bit of sound common sense? Before control of the rivers, drains and flood plains, were handed over to this self important quango, those in charge were the river agencies and before them the local farmers and landowners in their various water-management groups. And although there were autumn rains which were often torrential, we heard nothing of widespread misery and crippling, uninsured financial loss. Because they didn’t happen. 

The local people knew their individual territories intimately and, as they farmed them, had a vital interest in their maintenance. They understood the countryside whereas the bright young sparks of the Environment Agency most certainly do not.

Theirs is a story of out of touch, office-based ignorance, of low-lying areas such as the Somerset Levels (remember them flooding a couple of years ago?) being left untended, the rivers and drains there left undredged in case a vole or a rare woodlouse is disturbed; crucial run-offs choked with weed. In short, a load of once free-flowing watercourses are full to the brim by late October, just waiting for a few more inches to burst their banks and bring disaster to nearby country folk.

We have politicians running around the country at the moment, each of them making wildly impossible promises as to what they will do if we vote for them. I would like just one of them to pledge to conduct a really thorough enquiry into not just the Environment Agency but our entire quangocracy. 

These people sit in warm offices far from the real world, shuffling paper as they work on their real agendas – expanding their size, staff levels, budgets, salaries, pension pots, expenses, rules and regulations – the really important agendas of life! 

When crises emerge, or even just threaten to emerge with time to do something, a holed-up civil servant behind double-glazing eighty miles away is a waste of space and almost inevitably they react when it is far too late. 

When local problems were handled locally by people with a personal and vital interest, there may have been a few disturbed dormice or newts but we seldom got entire communities wading through their devastated homes.

The bureaucratisation of this country has been steady and relentless until all our lives are now administered by ‘jobsworths’ many miles from the crisis – which is why we get so many damned crises.

This week there was more government inspired violence in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo. Yes I know it is on the other side of the world and part of that dreadful place called Africa, but while Mr Corbyn is again threatening to preach about the evils of colonialism, can we not spare a thought for those people who are suffering and dying because the benefits of colonialism have been taken away from them?

Film clips of men, women and children being savagely beaten by uniformed policemen in city streets are rarely shown on the British television channels, nor do they appear in the daily papers. However, they are smuggled out and posted on to social media where they tend to make one’s blood run cold.

This sort of ‘legal violence’ should not be allowed in this gentle twenty first century. But where are the politicians or demonstrators of the western world when this is going on? Why are they so quiet about it? Come on Mr Corbyn; take Emmerson Mnangagwa and his governing thugs to task, not long dead colonial administrators of a bygone age.

Let Mr Mnangagwa know of your disapproval, not that he will care. He is oblivious to what is going on in his own country and while the Zimbabwean economy struggles, inflation rockets upward by the day and the majority of his citizens are starving, this worthy president of one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world flies out on five State visits in a luxury Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner. This gin palace costs a staggering seventy five thousand American dollars an hour to rent! The price tag on this latest trip for aircraft rental alone was twenty five million American dollars.

This did not even include the cost of food and luxury accommodation for himself and his large entourage!

The Vice President (as did Robert Mugabe) spends months in China and other foreign hospitals getting treatment for some secret ailment while four hundred doctors get fired in Zimbabwe and basic medical facilities are falling apart or have become non-existent as I told you the other day.

Hyperinflation is currently topping three hundred and seventy percent through poor governance and the complete lack of understanding of crisis management, or any management damnit.

Fuel and other basic necessities are largely unavailable. Unemployment is well over ninety percent. The media is controlled by the State and elections are routinely rigged.

Blame is packed on the colonialists, imperialists, whites and foreign countries that have imposed personal sanctions on a handful of leading politicians. No blame is taken by Mnangagwa himself. On the contrary, last week, ten city streets around the country were named after him!

Now it seems that Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party are going to encourage this corrupt buffoon by agreeing with him that everything that smacks of colonialism is inherently evil.