Looking Ahead

It’s happened.  The seawall at Dawlish has been washed away, leaving the main line railway track suspended in mid-air.

Fortunately, the London regime is known for looking ahead, anticipating such problems as arise from climate change and planning new infrastructure to cope with them.  It could have wasted tens of billions building unnecessary new lines in the London area, in response to the clamouring of bankers for shorter journey times to their provincial fiefdoms.  Instead it had the foresight to listen to real experts and re-open the line from Exeter to Plymouth via Okehampton and Tavistock – or any one of a number of alternatives – to provide a diversionary route.  What could have been a disaster – Plymouth cut off from the national rail network for up to six weeks – was thus carefully avoided.

In much the same way, the London regime listened to those warning that Wessex cannot take more housing and other development because its environment is at breaking point and can only get worse.  The regime responded by stopping any more building, either on floodplains or on the higher ground from which water runs off, and made it clear that the population of Wessex, far from growing even further, needs to decline from its current, unsustainable level.  Large-scale tree-planting was then undertaken, to retain excess water and provide the raw material for future renewable energy projects.

It would be nice to think that that’s what happened.  A government at Westminster dependent for its survival on the votes of Wessex Regionalist MPs would indeed have had to do all of the above.  As ever, it’s not the difference you can see when we’re elected that counts but the difference you can see when we aren’t.