Some things never change
Politicians will always tend towards large scale monolithic answers which are almost always the wrong answer and involve selling the family silver in one shape or another. Take the current answer to the current housing shortage in the South East, which is, build more house in the South East. Yet catch a train from London to Edinburgh and you'll pass by towns like Doncaster where there are empty houses strewn about the place. We have the housing stock; just that we have an infrastructure geared towards draining all the working age young adults to the South East to spend their useful days working in the Hell that is London. We don't have a housing shortage nationwide.
The smart answer would be to move the jobs for which the people are sucked into London to the Doncasters and Burys of this country. There are 200,000 civil servants in London (each generating approximately 3 other jobs, making 800,000 jobs, representing 3 million people inc. the families.) Move entire ministries - including their mandarins and ministers - out of London to cheaper areas of the country with spare capacity. That frees up real estate in London and its satellites, regenerates depressed areas, reduces running costs (cheaper buildings, no more London weighting allowance) and makes national government national, not London-centric, and you preserve the green belt, the fens, Wolds, Downs and Chiltern hills from myriad new Cambournes and Peterboroughs.
The smart answer would be to move the jobs for which the people are sucked into London to the Doncasters and Burys of this country. There are 200,000 civil servants in London (each generating approximately 3 other jobs, making 800,000 jobs, representing 3 million people inc. the families.) Move entire ministries - including their mandarins and ministers - out of London to cheaper areas of the country with spare capacity. That frees up real estate in London and its satellites, regenerates depressed areas, reduces running costs (cheaper buildings, no more London weighting allowance) and makes national government national, not London-centric, and you preserve the green belt, the fens, Wolds, Downs and Chiltern hills from myriad new Cambournes and Peterboroughs.
Another big government big mistake about to be made is the Severn Barrage. This will destroy large areas of wetland that are hugely significant for our bird population and make an irrevocable change to our landscape.
But a better, cheaper, quicker to install, more consistent method of power generation from the Severn's incredible tidal power is available in the form of tidal current turbines that tap into Wave and tidal stream energy. Commercial energy suppliers such as EDS are making great progress with tidal current turbines and are now at the commercial implementation stage after successful field trials. These are projected to produce electricity at prices below that which the barrage will produce, and more consistently. The barrage can produce power for 6 hours out of every 12 as it only produces on the outgoing tide. Tidal current turbines (which are very similar to wind turbines, but underwater) have a near constant current to work from and, being submersed and out to sea, do not affect the wetlands, and are distributed so avoiding single point of failure, and can be online produce power a decade ahead of the barrage.
Cheaper, quicker to install, more consistent supply, much less damage. That in mind, the Government are backing the wrong horse. Again. Why? Fuck knows. My guess is ministers are so incredibly incompetent and wrapped up in their constant battle to win elections that they're backing the more expensive, less useful, more damaging scheme because it sounds green, they can remember the name of it, there are some big numbers to float around, and beating the opposition is all that matters.
Why someone wants to win elections at all costs I do not know. You'd think people would go for election to make things better based on what they think that would entail. You know, have ideas, opinions, or principles, but it is not that. People stand for election with the aim of being elected. End of. It is a shameless a pursuit of electoral victory as an end in itself, not a means to and end.
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