Why can’t we do this in the UK, or indeed anywhere in the West?
While the UK swelters through summer heatwaves under unimaginative, managed-decline leadership, China is building practical systems to cool its streets: mist cooling, shaded public spaces, green corridors, high-speed infrastructure, mass planning and actual public works.
Not another think-tank report. Not another consultant-led strategy.
Not a minister in rolled-up sleeves pretending to care for the cameras.
Actual intervention.
Here, we are told to adapt. Close the curtains. Drink water. Check on vulnerable neighbours. Maybe install air conditioning if you can afford the bill.
In other words, cope privately with a public failure.
The West will do almost nothing unless a profit margin is attached. That is the difference.
Where is the vision? Where is the innovation? Where is the state that builds? Britain once built reservoirs, railways, council housing, power stations, hospitals, public parks and whole new towns.
Now we cannot even cool a city street without first asking which private contractor gets the deal, which investor gets the return, and which consultancy gets paid to write the report.
There is a malaise in the political class now. They will use public money to prop up a failing private sector, underwrite corporate risk, subsidise investors, rescue broken markets and guarantee returns, but ask them to build directly for the public good and suddenly they pretend the cupboard is bare.
That is the real sickness: economic naivety dressed up as responsibility.
We are a sovereign nation that issues its own currency. Within the real restraints of labour, materials, energy, skills and inflation, we can afford to build what we need inside our own country.
The question is not whether Britain can afford public works. The question is why our leaders can only imagine public money when it is being poured into private pockets.
China sees a public problem and builds a public solution. The West sees a public problem and asks how it can be packaged, outsourced, monetised and delayed until someone makes money from it.
This is not about worshipping China. It is about asking why our own leaders have become so small, so timid, so useless, and so captured by the market that even basic public imagination now looks foreign to them.
Not another think-tank report. Not another consultant-led strategy.
Not a minister in rolled-up sleeves pretending to care for the cameras.
Actual intervention.
Here, we are told to adapt. Close the curtains. Drink water. Check on vulnerable neighbours. Maybe install air conditioning if you can afford the bill.
In other words, cope privately with a public failure.
The West will do almost nothing unless a profit margin is attached. That is the difference.
Where is the vision? Where is the innovation? Where is the state that builds? Britain once built reservoirs, railways, council housing, power stations, hospitals, public parks and whole new towns.
Now we cannot even cool a city street without first asking which private contractor gets the deal, which investor gets the return, and which consultancy gets paid to write the report.
There is a malaise in the political class now. They will use public money to prop up a failing private sector, underwrite corporate risk, subsidise investors, rescue broken markets and guarantee returns, but ask them to build directly for the public good and suddenly they pretend the cupboard is bare.
That is the real sickness: economic naivety dressed up as responsibility.
We are a sovereign nation that issues its own currency. Within the real restraints of labour, materials, energy, skills and inflation, we can afford to build what we need inside our own country.
The question is not whether Britain can afford public works. The question is why our leaders can only imagine public money when it is being poured into private pockets.
China sees a public problem and builds a public solution. The West sees a public problem and asks how it can be packaged, outsourced, monetised and delayed until someone makes money from it.
This is not about worshipping China. It is about asking why our own leaders have become so small, so timid, so useless, and so captured by the market that even basic public imagination now looks foreign to them.
