The minister called it "the new normal." That is not weather forecasting.

The story

Drought has been officially declared across more than half of England, with millions warned this is "the new normal" by water minister Emma Hardy. It is the third drought in five years, and with only two days left in the month, July may become the driest on record. England has had just 7% of its expected rainfall this month, and only 1% in the south. Seven areas are in drought: East Anglia, London and Hertfordshire, the Thames Valley, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall, the West Midlands, and Wessex. Only the north-east and Yorkshire have "normal conditions for the time of year." Hardy said: "Our climate is changing, droughts are becoming increasingly common, and we need to be prepared for this new normal." She insisted the government was "delivering long-term change" in the water industry, including "record investments in infrastructure, including nine new reservoirs."

The reframe

"The new normal" is doing a great deal of work in that quote, and it is worth asking what work exactly. Presented as a candid acknowledgement of climate reality, it also functions as something else: a way of describing a third consecutive-pattern drought in five years as a condition to be managed rather than a failure to be answered for. Weather is not something any minister controls, and nobody disputes that rainfall has genuinely fallen. What is being asked of the public, though, is to accept "prepared for this new normal" as a complete response, when the actual infrastructure promised in reply, nine new reservoirs, exists mostly as a future tense. None of them will fill this drought.

That gap between the promise and the delivery is the pattern this book keeps returning to. People are told what is being done about a recurring problem while the practical remedy remains years away, and the language used, "record investments," "delivering long-term change," is built to reassure in the present rather than to describe anything that currently exists. It is a reasonable bet that most readers of this story will not object loudly. They will simply notice, file it alongside the last drought and the one before that, and adjust their expectations of what "the new normal" is actually likely to mean the next time a minister uses the phrase.