Despite the economic maelstrom, the Government retains its determination to push ahead with an obsolete spatial development agenda.
From the bunker come orders for three million new homes, lots of urban sprawl and a quango answerable to no-one to approve motorways and airports.
Should one be appalled? Or even surprised? Sadly not in a country whose main political parties are trying to out-bid each others' proposed tax cuts, whatever the effect on the country's growing mountain of debt.
If borrowing is really going to revive the economy, it needs to be invested in projects like land reclamation and remediation which help British companies and provide the basis for future recovery, but tax cuts would mostly be wasted on consumer goods.
This month it was left to the Commons Environmental Audit Committee to point out that current policy is environmentally unsustainable and actively promotes urban sprawl.
It was depressing to see English Partnerships telling the MPs that availability of brownfield land for housing has been vastly exaggerated and England only has potential for 360,000 homes, not a million.
A cynic might note this would still accommodate the next three or four years' worth of current output but actually it's easy to arrive at such estimates if you distort planning policy to ignore land needing remediation, which often becomes available during planning periods.
Such unsustainable policies have, of course, been forced on central government by HM Treasury in recent years in a bid to satisfy its cynical appetite for urban sprawl.
The same government executed without blinking a U-turn in 2002 from the wiser and more environmentally friendly policies it had previously pursued.
Yet now the new world economic and environmental order dictates a very rapid U-turn, it's all too much for the same ministers to contemplate.
