Let's Privatise the Chlorophyll

The Government is expected to prove its green credentials later this week by privatising some trees, presumably on the grounds that there is very little else left to steal. The sainted Thatcher and her Gordon Brown, whose name escapes me at the moment, both tried to privatise the Forestry Commission, but were prevented by pressure from conservation groups and their own inability to provide their friends with appropriate sweeteners; Daveybloke's Cuddlies are therefore going about the business in the spirit of George W Bush gittin Saddam on account of his Pa. The Minister for Greenwashing, Caroline Spelman, is hatching a plot to sell off a hundred and fifty thousand hectares of state-owned forest and other land within the next three years. At present prices this would raise about two hundred and fifty million pounds, as against such purely intangible and unprofitable benefits as preventing erosion and absorbing carbon: all the sorts of things that are despised by Daveybloke's allies in the East European far right, his counterparts in the American Tea Party and his chums in the City. Nevertheless, and even with the glittering examples of privatisation in Britain's water, energy and railways to look to, a spokesman for the Woodland Trust was cynical enough to claim that the land "will not be sold for anything like its real environmental and social value" and even that "there is no way the private sector is going to provide the same level of care" as the Commission does now.

The Liberal Democrat Secretary for Energy and Climate Change, meanwhile, has done his bit to mitigate the lunacy by hinting that it is not altogether impossible that certain not un-environmental agencies may survive George's little chopper in approximately 66 per cent of their present form, provided they do as they are told.