A basic working theory - the world’s gone mad

We’d also insist that this is a workable theory, not just a useful working one. That the world around us has gone mad.

Ed Miliband will decide whether Britain’s biggest solar farm can be built on Winston Churchill’s ancestral estate after the renewables project cleared a key hurdle.

The Planning Inspectorate confirmed on Friday that the Botley West Solar Farm on Blenheim Estate had been accepted for examination.

Months of scrutiny will now follow to determine the project’s feasibility before the Energy Secretary will decide next year whether it can proceed.

If approved, the site will cover at least 2,471 acres of the 12,000-acre estate and provide renewable energy to more than 300,000 homes in Oxfordshire.

This is, because of course it is, in the Green Belt:

This is a huge proposal, covering 1,400 hectares (14 sq km, 5.4 sq miles) of mostly agricultural land in Oxford’s ‘Green Belt’ a ring around the city intended to be kept free of new buildings and other developments.

The Green Belt is that area of land which will, if built upon, be the ruination of the national patrimony. That’s the claim at least.

If that land were devoted to housing at current minimum density insistence we could plonk 42,000 houses there. This would also never be allowed of course - ruination of the national patrimony etc.

But now for the madness. A solar farm - whether those are useful or not at our northern latitudes - can be placed 5 or 15 or 50 miles wherever. We have this technology called “wires” that can move the resulting electricity around. There is no argument, at all, in favour of the ruination of the national patrimony to produce a bit of electricity that is.

Housing, on the other hand, everything is location, location, location. Being 5 - or 15 or 50 - miles closer or further makes all the difference. So, if we’re willing to ruin the national patrimony then it is for housing that we should be willing to do so and not solar farms. Yet that is exactly, precisely and wholly the opposite way around from how the system, governance and the world actually works.

Time to return to the ancestral wisdom of the Yorkist* forbears. “The whole world’s mad ‘scept thee and me. Not so sure about thee, neither.”

Tim Worstall

* Probably. They’re unlikely to have been Lancastrians up there.