The Environment - Another Sacrificial Lamb

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the sacrifice of environmental pledges for the perceived sake of the British economy in yesterday's Autumn Statement has gone unremarked.

On coming into office, the new coalition government here promised to be "the greenest government ever", but there has been little sign of it. I was saddened to hear the Chancellor say, in his sombre address to MPs, that planning regulations and legislation that protected the wildlife and countryside would be put aside in order to help industry and job creation, making it clear to those who truly heard that he has no understanding of the vital importance of environmental protection for our future, short term and long term.

No-one seemed to hear. No-one seems to care. The only protest against the new environmental emphasis was from Caroline Lucas, our only Green MP but whose lone voice was quickly lost in roars of (mostly masculine) approval. The desire for growth and wealth creation, at any cost, reigns still, and none of the decision-makers recognises that green technology development, for example, could achieve the same results and benefit everybody and everything.

This is a strange old world, and one which, as an onlooker as well as a participant, gets stranger by the day. My comfort, as I strive not always successfully to be non-judgmental on these matters, is that there is a tipping point to planetary tolerance, and it has been reached. Many of the plans outlined in Parliament yesterday will never progress beyond the paper on which they were written: I believe, actually, that Mr Osborne, in his heart, knows this too.