Birmingham Post

John Redwood, the Tory MP for Wokingham, was reported as saying: "The Government's failure to prevent these floods is an outrage. Their response was appallingly lackadaisical. Ministers are nowhere to be seen. There were no sandbags in place, no pumps and no ditches had been cleared."

The Tory's environment spokesman, Peter Ainsworth, whose East Surrey constituency was so badly hit gymkhanas were cancelled, added: "It is a matter of serious concern that the Met Office had predicted what was going to happen but the messages don't seem to have got through at local level to put adequate protection in place."

Let us consider the last of these comments first. Your head would have needed to be buried in a sandbag not to have heard the Met Office predictions last week. Those TV graphics with the big dark clouds were a giveaway. The message got through to the local level all right, it is just that no one - and that really means no one - could have foreseen the extreme effects of the deluge. That's the whole point about extremes of weather: there's diddly-squat you can do about it.

Hurricanes and tropical storms batter parts of the world with shocking regularity. There are often criticisms about the official response to the clean-up operation - insufficient water supplies, slow infrastructure reconstruction - but no one is daft enough to suggest statutory authorities can do anything to prevent these natural disasters happening in the first place.

It is anticipated that the River Severn will hit its highest level since 1947 after rising at a rate of almost half-an-inch per hour on Sunday night. On a statistical basis that means such extremes of weather happen in this country once every 60 years, so you are unlikely to get two occasions of it in a lifetime.

Yes, some places in Worcestershire have been flooded a number of times in the past month but these places tend to flood during heavy rain and will continue to do so. If people choose to live in these towns and villages they must expect these unfortunate events to occur.

What is unusual is that places traditionally unaffected by flood water have been swamped. It is also remarkable that the deluge afflicting the Midlands and the West has followed so close on the heels of the Yorkshire floods. But that is all it is, remarkable. Lightning has not struck twice.

To suggest, as Mr Redwood has, that Labour is at fault for failing to stop the floods is nonsense. Government bods, apparently, were "nowhere to be seen". What were they meant to do? Get an SAS airlift into Tewkesbury and help to bail out homes using ministerial buckets and sponges?

One of the problems here is that people have become sanitised from reality. They have become accustomed to think that bad things do not happen and when they do happen, they expect to be cossetted. Insurers eventually will pick up the tab for damage and those who recklessly failed to take out adequate cover have only themselves to blame.

Our emergency services, the military and countless volunteers deserve every praise for helping the flood victims. It is a pity some people, including politicians, haven't displayed the same gumption.