I SEE from his Facebook page and your Journal that twenty years after the lunacy of an A36 superhighway between Southampton and Bristol was abandoned, MP John Glen is anxious to drag out of Highways England’s filing cabinets every vanity scheme he can resurrect, including the A303, the A350 and the A36.

His predecessor, Robert Key, who abandoned some of these schemes designed to wreck huge swathes of Wiltshire’s landscape, habitat and heritage, did finally and reluctantly wake up to the utter futility and inpracticality of it.

Now we know that road building inevitably worsens the problem it is meant to solve, that it offers no benefit to the economy of the nation (indeed the reverse) or to Wiltshire and that it is entirely inconsistent with any pretence the government may have to be concerned about climate change or any other environmental matter.

So what is it that makes John Glen hark back to these 1970s ambitions; why can’t he move into the twenty-first century and recognise that the planet has limits? Is it just boyish petrolhead enthusiasm or is it simply an intellectual inability to discern consequences of what he says?

Not living in Wiltshire it’s not for me to wonder why people vote for a man who wants to lay waste the wonderful landscapes of Salisbury’s valleys, or the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge or the precious White Horse escarpment at Westbury.

But here in Hampshire I really take exception to this unthinking man proposing to force a superhighway through my county, through the northern fringes of the New Forest or the Blackwater Valley of the Wellows.

Hampshire County Council has firmly indicated that it does not want an expansion of the A36 here. Who is John Glen to dictate otherwise?

Chris Gillham, Winchester