I've said it before and I'll say it again...

This is interesting: plans for the world's first purpose-built "eco-city" at Dongtan at the mouth of the Yangtze river in China. A model for future urban design and development, using the latest environmentally sound techniques for waste management, energy generation, transport, agriculture, etc. etc. All highly commendable, but could it happen here? You think about that for no more than a second or two before quite literally soiling yourself laughing.

The absurd debate over road traffic charging in this country highlights the nature of the problem: no-one is in any doubt over the need for our behaviour patterns to change to combat global warming, but no-one wants to be the one to have to make the sacrifice in terms of their own lifestyle. This is where a brave and principled government could step in and decide to impose legislation on a potentially unwilling population, i.e to say: this is what needs to be done, it's for your own good, you'll thank me for this when we're not all huddled around the last tree in existence in Antarctica in 70 years time. The trouble with this is twofold: firstly the timescale for seeing concrete evidence of any benefits from such a scheme is far greater than the period a government is elected for, and secondly the unwilling population you're imposing this enlightened and planet-saving legislation on also constitutes your electorate. So even if you could use your majority to force something like this through into law, you'd be more than likely to find yourself out on your ear at the next election. This is why, or so it could be argued (and to quote Kent Brockman), democracy simply doesn't work. Far-sighted and radical reform is difficult, if not impossible, when your short-term objective is always keeping the electorate happy enough not to vote you out in 4 or 5 years time. So maybe enlightened dictatorship is the answer. But who gets to choose who gets in? And what happens when they flip and start eating small children?

Then again if the electorate had a direct line to the government policy machine we'd have certain laws in place that I'd be mildly uncomfortable with: capital punishment would be back, as well as public stonings and burnings for suspected (or just alleged by the News Of The World) paedophiles, as well as pediatricians, podiatrists, people from Peterborough....for that reason I'm not sure the radical approach to policy formulation taken by French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal is a development to be welcomed, as it basically seems to be starting with a blank sheet of paper, corralling a few people into focus groups and getting them to fill in a few multiple choice forms, and then using the results to concoct an entire set of policies for the election campaign. Call me old-fashioned, but there was something quite reassuring about candidates who had some sort of definitely formed set of policies before the campaign started, rather than just airily waving their hands around and promising to wing it as they went along.

For all that (and the Royal campaign looks to be going through a bit of a rocky patch at the moment) we could be in a situation in a year or two where the leaders of three of the major nations of the world could be women: Ségolène Royal in France, Hillary Clinton in the USA and Angela Merkel in Germany. I personally suspect it won't happen (well, Angela Merkel is in already) as I strongly suspect that the Americans in particular won't be able to bring themselves to do it. I do think it would be an unequivocal Good Thing if it happened, though, just to shake up the status quo a bit. In particular if Hillary Clinton managed to get enough of the intellectual liberal vote out to get in it would be highly amusing to see the swathe of deaths in bible-belt middle America as people's heads imploded.