THE month of August is traditionally the height of the silly season, and it is perhaps in this context that a report by a self-styled "think tank" should be understood.

So utterly daft are its conclusions that it is hard to know where to start in countering them.

Essentially, the authors argue that cities such as Liverpool are beyond revival and millions of their residents should move to London and the South East instead.

They even claimed it was time to be "realistic about the ability of cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle to re-generate struggling nearby towns such as Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland". What planet are they on?

All of the 3m new homes planned by the Government should be shared equally between the capital city, Oxford and Cambridge, they said, with restrictions on house-building in the South-east lifted to lower house prices.

It would seem the authors are arguing that the majority of the working population should, in effect, be tipped into the south of the country, leaving the rest of the UK as an economically inactive wasteland.

The implications of such a mass internal migration are mind-boggling. The infrastructure of London and the South-east can barely cope as it is, and it is hard to see how it could accommodate huge numbers of in-comers from the North.

Rather than making sweeping and meaningless generalisations about how cities such as Liverpool have "lost much of their raison d’etre," it would be interesting to know whether the authors have even visited the city recently to see the changes that have taken place.

If they had done, they would have seen how leisure and tourism is now the driver of the local economy, rather than traditional heavy industries.

Of course, by making such bizarre and extreme statements, the authors are guaranteed publicity for their report. But it also guarantees that virtually none of it can be taken seriously.