People losing their damn minds #16

There's a housing shortage down south so the sensible thing to do, one would think, would be to build some more. Now I don't know anything about construction but slightly less sensible, I'd have thought, would be to propose building 150 000 houses on the Thames.

Because the Thames is a river, right? And you tend to think a river wouldn't be an ideal spot to do a bit of house-building, being rather on the wet side. But this is, apparently, what John Redwood has proposed:

"Multi-billion-pound plans for two "cities in the sea" are being proposed by one of David Cameron's advisers as an answer to housing shortages and global warming."

In fairness, he doesn't want to build the houses directly on the water - because that would be really silly. Instead, he "invoked centuries-old land reclamation techniques in Holland".

Uh huh. Now, I remember learning this in primary school. Someone stuck a finger in a dyke at one point and I seem to recall, albeit vaguely, that this had something to do with the fact that the Netherlands was below sea level. Whereas Britain's still above sea level, isn't it? Wouldn't it be simpler to build some new houses on some, um, dry bits and maybe add a few transport links?

I liked the last paragraph in the Telegraph article:

"However, Mr Redwood's ambitious idea appeared to take people by surprise yesterday, with neither the Government nor the Environment Agency able to comment."

Not unwilling but unable. Speechless they were, probably thinking to themselves, "Man's done gone lost his damn mind."

John Redwood: Finds building houses on dry bits of land to be illogical, captain.