Britain has some of the highest electricity costs in the world. This week, we learned a startling reason why: fish discos.

It’s an insane example of a nation known for sumptuous manor houses and world-leading bridge, dam, canal and railway construction being paralyzed by pettifogging bureaucracy.

• Hinkley Point C is a $60 billion project to build Britain’s first new nuclear power station in 20 years. Ten years into construction, it’s massively over budget and ridiculously delayed. Government regulations required EDF Energy to spend nearly $1 billion to protect local fish. This includes $65 million for a “fish disco,” an acoustic treatment to keep fish away.
• How much salmon is Britain saving for $1 billion? One every 12 years. It should also save the life of one trout every 36 years and six lampreys a year. (Henry I famously loved the jawless fish so much that he died from a “surfeit of lampreys,” but even he would surely question the value for money there.)

This comes after Britain’s HS2 high-speed rail project spent $130 million on a 1-kilometer tunnel designed to save a colony of 300 bats.

• Britain has spent more planning and preparing to build a road tunnel under the Thames than Norway spent actually building the world’s longest road tunnel.

Britain’s bureaucracy is a behemoth. Most British adults rely on the state for their income, either in benefits or government paychecks. Even more get their money from the government as contractors. No small part of the mammoth state’s bureaucratic energy is expended on propagating rules that make it very hard for anyone to get anything done.

• Herbert W. Armstrong described his frustrations with building a college in Britain in 1960, and warned: “This purposeless, lethargic, pleasure and ease-seeking attitude of no goal except the existence of the moment, spells decadence! Every nation in history that ever got into this condition has perished!”

Spending $1 billion to protect a few fish isn’t exactly lethargic, but it’s certainly purposeless. It’s a symptom of a nation sorely lacking in vision. We are squandering more than money—we are sabotaging our capacity to create and build. Blind bureaucrats are unwittingly constructing Britain’s road to ruin.