The subject of their evasions is the interests of the people whose lives and property are involved in "managed retreat", and the wider but less definable public interests, which include heritage, recreation and ecology. I shall lump them together into a single category - the defence of the realm.
The flooding of land, these days, is seldom an act of God. It is the consequence of the decision not to reinforce existing sea walls. It is the consequence, too, of decisions made by authorities up and down the coastline - a bit of dredging for aggregates there or the full-time dredging for the port of Felixstowe. This is why, now that Cnut mode has become default mode for all ministerial and official statements about coastal flooding, many people (including officials themselves, off the record) feel something is wrong.
No one disputes that we should defend London from flooding - indeed billions of pounds worth of property would flood every year if we did not spend millions preventing it. It is a much harder decision deciding which parts of the remote rural coastline we should abandon, because so many factors are involved, many of which are hard to quantify in strict financial terms.
The suspicion is that the system that Defra has invented in the past year for "scoring" proposed schemes for defending the coast is not a system for coastal defence at all, just a Treasury-inspired excuse for doing nothing where something has been done before.
The story of the Martello tower at Bawdsey on the Suffolk coast poses all the right questions. Here we have a Napoleonic fort, a scheduled ancient monument, on a famously moveable shingle coast that also happens to be an area of outstanding natural beauty and of great wildlife interest (when dry). One can sympathise hugely with its owner, John Fell-Clark, who woke up one morning in 1997 and found that 50 yards of beach had washed away. But sympathy is not enough reason why public money should be deployed saving his retirement home from the sea.
But his Martello tower sits on the key strategic point of the whole coast (as it was in the Napoleonic and in both world wars). If the crumbling concrete walls and rock armour dumped by the local authority is breached this winter, as officials believe highly probable, the tides will roll inland immediately for miles. They will wash away at Shingle Street, eroding it completely in 20 years, and at Orford Ness; they could make Aldeburgh an island and will clog up the port of Felixstowe 10 miles to the south.
The Environment Agency concedes that the need to reinforce East Lane Point is "immediate" and "urgent" and that the policy for the coastline is to hold the line - not actually to retreat. And yet, because of Defra's newly invented scoring system, designed to divert funds from the coast to protect John Prescott's new, unsustainable, non-communities in the flood plains, there is no money to fund even urgent work. Yet there is no fall-back line, no plan, nothing. The actual policy is unmanaged retreat.
If you talk privately to the agency's own flood defence experts, they will tell you that Defra's new scoring system has almost no way of properly valuing things such as history, heritage, local feeling or an attractive, protected coastline. In short, it is a Treasury fix and inadequate for defending the realm. Once that is understood, I suspect it may not last as long as the crumbling defences at Bawdsey.
In his day, King Cnut, who was called Great, knew a thing or two about the defence of the realm. He successfully invaded it and then defended it against all-comers, with such success that he could frequently leave it to pursue interests overseas.
This Government spends fortunes pursuing its interests overseas, but would appear to have forgotten that this sceptred isle is beautiful, loved and worth defending.