As rivers swell and homes are cut off, scientists say UK winter rainfall is already 20 years ahead of predictions
When flooding hit the low-lying Somerset Levels in 2014, it took two months for the waters to rise. This week it took two days, said Rebecca Horsington, chair of the Flooding on the Levels Action Group and a born-and-bred resident. A fierce barrage of storms from the Atlantic has drenched south-west England in January, saturating soils and supercharging rivers.
“It’s déjà vu,” she said. “The stress and anxiety is palpable in the community. We’ve all been here before, we know what happens and it shouldn’t. But since 2014, the weather events are becoming more and more frequent and the rain just dumps now.”
The climate crisis is here and now and this is its face in Britain, scientists told the Guardian. But the devastating impacts are accelerating faster than the work to keep communities protected, they said: torrential winter rains are arriving 20 years earlier than climate models projected. While those forced from homes engulfed by filthy water are suffering today, a darker question is looming: will some settlements have to be abandoned?
Storm Chandra, which pummelled the south-west this week, followed hot on the heels of Storms Goretti and Ingrid. New 24-hour rainfall records were set in places in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Setting new records is the new normal in the climate crisis.
Somerset council declared a major incident on Tuesday and across the south-west homes and businesses were flooded, communities cut off, schools closed, trains cancelled and dozens of people were rescued from stranded vehicles.
“These events are getting more frequent and more serious,” said Bryony Sadler, a hairdresser from Moorland, a village on the Levels. She was planning an evacuation of her family and animals when the Guardian spoke to her this week as the waters rose. “The rain is heavier and more intense, the winds stronger.”
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Paige Didcote says her anxiety is “through the roof” living on the street (Image: BBC)
People living on a street at severe risk of flooding are set to discover whether plans to buy and demolish their homes will go ahead.
Clydach Terrace, in Ynysybwl, Rhondda Cynon Taf, has a “unique risk of significant flooding” from the nearby Nant Clydach stream. It was under water during Storms Dennis and Bert, with homes extensively damaged.
Paige Didcote, who lives on the street, said her anxiety was “through the roof” and flood warnings “terrified” her.
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Tory defector Suella Braverman speaks with Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage(Image: Getty Images)
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s latest high-profile recruit, Suella Braverman, had a trip paid for by The Heritage Foundation — a supporter of the controversial US immigration agency ICE
Reform defector Suella Braverman has been bankrolled by a think-tank backing the US immigration agency behind a deadly shooting.
The ex-Home Secretary became the latest high-profile Tory to join Nigel Farage‘s party this week. But we can reveal she accepted a freebie trip worth more than £9,000 from The Heritage Foundation — a supporter of controversial ICE in the wake of a mum being killed. In recent weeks, the award-winning poet’s death and that of an ICU nurse at the hands of another US agency have sparked outrage. In an interview on Tuesday, Donald Trump said his administration was “going to de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota. “Bottom line, it was terrible. Both of them were terrible,” the US president said.
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Hope Not Hate’s Director of Research, Joe Mulhall, added: “Sadly, it is no surprise that Suella Braverman has accepted funds from the Heritage Foundation. Her own increasingly radical politics, which have seen her defect to Reform UK, align well with much of the output of this infamous US think-tank. Braverman was the Home Secretary who described asylum seekers arriving in the UK by boat as an ‘invasion’, adopting and normalising the language of the far right. She’s now in Reform, a party that has called for ‘mass deportations,’ a plan that if enacted would require something akin to a British version of ICE.”
Braverman, who represents Fareham and Waterlooville in Hampshire, accepted flights, accommodation and airport transfers valued at £9,358.71 from The Heritage Foundation in January last year, her register of interests shows. During the visit, she delivered the annual Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture. In a tweet promoting her speech, she echoed Trump’s rhetoric, writing: “Too many people are coming into our country who do not abide by our laws, sign up to our values or respect our culture. In fact, too many wish to do us harm. We have all had enough. It’s time to Make Britain Great Again.”
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Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, December 2025. Credit: Nigel Farage / X
The leader of Reform, a pro-oil party, received lavish hospitality from Abu Dhabi.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage received freebies worth £10,000 from the Abu Dhabi government, new records show.
Farage’s latest register of interests shows that he accepted flights and accommodation to attend the Abu Dhabi Formula 1 Grand Prix in December, paid for by the regime that runs the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This included a front-row “paddock” pass to the event worth £4,500.
The records show that Farage also attended “meetings” during his visit.
The Reform leader has previously mocked Prime Minister Keir Starmer for receiving gifts from donors.
Reform campaigns for the UK to dramatically expand its fossil fuel production, scrap its clean energy policies, and dismantle its climate targets.
The UAE is an autocratic monarchy and petrostate. Roughly 30 percent of the country’s GDP is directly based on its oil and gas output.
Reform received 92 percent of its donations between the 2019 and 2024 UK elections from polluting sources and climate science deniers, while its treasurer Nick Candy has claimed the party is actively raising money from oil executives.
Senior party figures have also praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s “drill baby drill” agenda, which has seen his administration recently capture Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and pledge that the U.S. oil industry will “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country”.
Farage denies basic climate science, claiming it’s “absolutely nuts” for carbon dioxide to be considered a pollutant. The party is being advised by the Heartland Institute, a U.S.-based pro-Trump climate denial group. Farage helped to launch Heartland’s UK-EU branch in December last year.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, has said “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”
The IPCC has also stated that carbon dioxide pollution “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
Key individuals in Reform have also heaped praise on the UAE in recent months.
Reform deputy leader Richard Tice has said he travels to the UAE “every six to eight weeks” to visit his partner, Telegraph columnist Isabel Oakeshott, who moved to Dubai in January 2025.
Tice has praised the UAE for its sense of national pride, work ethic, law and order, integration of migrants, and energy sector, while stating that the UK is “decadent” and “going bust”.
In an article last January for the website Arabian Gulf Business Insight, Candy praised the UAE’s crime prevention and “robust law enforcement”, adding: “Coupled with a high standard of living, excellent healthcare and top-tier schools, the UAE offers a lifestyle that few other locations can match.”
Candy also lauded “the wisdom and visionary nature of the UAE’s leadership”, writing that “the quality of government officials is mind-blowing”. By contrast, he said that Western countries are ruled by “second-tier individuals” who “allow political agendas to get in the way of what is best for the country”.
The UAE does not hold popular elections, and there are no political parties. Critics of the government are often jailed, while migrant workers face “widespread abuses” according to Human Rights Watch, including wage theft and passport confiscation.
The country also discriminates against women and its penal code allows the authorities to arrest people for campaigns promoting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
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President Donald Trump and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Vice President and Deputy Prime Minister, shake hands on October 13, 2025 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. (Photo by Suzanne Plunkett, Pool / Getty Images)
According to the Journal’s sources, lieutenants of Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a deal in early 2025 to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
Documents reviewed by the Journal showed that the buyers in the deal agreed to “pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities,” while “at least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with” the Witkoff family.
Weeks after green lighting the investment into the Trump crypto venture, Tahnoon met directly with President Donald Trump and Witkoff in the White House, where he reportedly expressed interest in working with the US on AI-related technology.
Two months after this, the Journal noted, “the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”
Tahnoon in the past had tried to get US officials to give the UAE access to the chips, but was rebuffed on concerns that the cutting-edge technology could be passed along to top US geopolitical rival China, wrote the Journal.
Many observers expressed shock at the Journal’s report, with some critics saying that it showed Trump and his associates were engaging in a criminal bribery scheme.
“This was a bribe,” wrote Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, in a social media post. “UAE royals gave the Trump family $500 million, and Trump, in his presidential capacity, gave them access to tightly guarded American AI chips. The most powerful person on the planet, also happens to be the most shamelessly corrupt.”
Jesse Eisinger, reporter and editor at ProPublica, argued that the Abu Dhabi investment into the Trump cypto firm “should rank among the greatest US scandals ever.”
Democratic strategist David Axelrod also said that the scope of the Trump crypto investment scandal was historic in nature.
“In any other time or presidency, this story… would be an earthquake of a scandal,” he wrote. “The size, scope and implications of it are unprecedented and mind-boggling.”
Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America,” struggled to wrap his head around the scale of corruption on display.
“How do you add up the cost of corruption this massive?” he wondered. “It’s not just that Trump is selling advanced AI tech to the highest bidder, national security be damned. Its that he’s tapped that doofus Steve Witkoff as an international emissary so his son Zach Witkoff can mop up bribes.”
Former Rep. Tom Malinkowski (D-NJ) warned the Trump and his associates that they could wind up paying a severe price for their deal with the UAE.
“If a future administration finds that such payments to the Trump family were acts of corruption,” he wrote, “these people could be sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, and the assets in the US could potentially be frozen.”
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