Sometimes you look at Britain and wonder if anyone is actually planning ahead, or whether governments just spend billions fixing one problem before discovering they have created another.
Take Scotland. We have huge amounts of wind power, but when too much electricity is produced the grid cannot always move it where it is needed, so turbines can be turned down. Only Britain could build thousands of wind turbines and then discover we needed the cables to carry the electricity. You might think cheap spare power could benefit the people living beside them. Apparently that would be too simple.
Then there is nuclear power. Britain is spending billions building stations that take years to complete, while new energy technology keeps moving forward. Knowing our luck, we will finally switch them on just as somebody invents something cheaper, smaller and better.
Then there is North Sea oil and gas. We have energy sitting under our own waters while worrying about imports and high bills. One side wants to drill everything, the other sometimes sounds like they would rather we all went back to living in caves. Meanwhile ordinary people just want affordable heating and secure energy.
Then there is HS2, Britain’s great railway project that started with a grand plan and slowly had bits removed from it. By the time it is properly running, somebody may have invented hover cars. Britain will then spend another ten years holding meetings about them.
And then we have immigration. We are told we need more workers because Britain is getting older and there are jobs that need filling. Fair enough. But at the same time AI and robots are learning to do more jobs every year. So we could bring in millions of workers to solve a labour shortage just before technology removes many of the jobs.
Then the government will spend billions retraining everyone to repair robots.
The robots will probably repair themselves.
And that is Britain’s real problem. It isn’t wind power, nuclear, oil and gas, HS2, immigration or technology. It is that governments seem to deal with every problem separately without joining the dots.
We don’t seem to have a national plan.
We have departments.
Each one fixing its own problem without asking what happens next.
So Britain’s strategy appears to be:
Build the wind turbines. Forget the cables. Build the nuclear station. Discover better technology. Build the railway. Remove half the route. Bring in the workers. Invent the robots.
Then hold an inquiry to find out why everything cost so much.
And finally announce:
“Lessons have been learned.”
They should have been.
We’ve certainly paid enough for them.
Leave a Reply