Enough of the hypocrisy already, David

Our leader has made a couple of pronouncements this week. First he took it upon himself to label Jimmy Carr's attempts to reduce his tax bill as morally wrong. This despite the fact that his own father made millions specialising in tax-free, off shore companies, millions that David has directly benefited from.

Then he announced that one way of saving £2 billion would be to take housing benefits from the under-25s. They can go and live with their parents if they can't afford it, can't they? seems to be his way of solving the problem of his proposed actions, which would put thousands of young people out on the street. £2 billion sounds like a lot of money, but remember the welfare bill is over £200 billion, considerably larger than the cost of funding the NHS.

We have all witnessed this week the flooding in many parts of Britain, the latest in a series of disastrous floods that have afflicted Britain in the last few years. This is one effect of global warming, and has arrived precisely on cue as the climate modelling specialists predicted.

I first hatched this idea in 2007, just as we were being drenched with floods the length and breadth of our nation, coinciding with Gordon Brown's installment as PM. I thought at the time, before the Great Financial Meltdown, that it would be a great idea to mount an enormous project, the equal of the massive schemes of the 19th century, like the expansion of the canal system, and especially the creation of a sewage network for the country so good it is still in use today.

Now money is tighter, we are told, but in a way that provides even more of an imperative to such a plan. By the use of quantitative easing, we could print the money, as the Americans did in the 1930s when they built the Hoover Dam and other great hydrological schemes to help lift the US out of the Great Depression.

I propose we target the 100 most vulnerable areas to flooding and build serious defences that will last for hundreds of years. The scheme could cost £40 billion, not cheap you might say, but certainly money well spent; better say, than a similar amount we forked out to fund our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. To help fund the project, we could abandon that national ego booster known as the Trident submarine and a few other completely unnecessary war accessories- it's called "socially useful work", and I for one venture to suggest it's a better idea than picking on the young people: give them some work to do...