Of course, this was all a PR con, or as these things are known these days - greenwash. Lets get down to the facts. The Tory-led government is in thrall to the corporations, and if there is one thing corporations hate its environmental regulation which prevents them dumping costs onto the environment in the form of pollution. It's not difficult to work out that we are going to see a weakening of environmental regulation and a knock down sale of our environmental assets.
So what is the "greenest government ever" doing? Well, its scrapped the Sustainable Development Commission and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution for a start. It's downsizing the public bodies which protect the environment like the Environment Agency and Natural England. It's planning to sell off our forests, its scrapped the fleet of emergency tugs which are there to protect the marine environment, and it wants to start building new uneconomic and unsustainable nuclear power stations - like the Olkilouto plant in Finland which has been an outrageously expensive botched cock-up.
Behind much of this is the disaster of The Public Bodies Bill which gives the government powers to scrap public bodies at will. The bill is audacious, mendacious and dangerous for the environment. These bodies were created by parliament but parliament will have no say in their merger or removal.
The reality is that this is likely to be the least green government ever with falling environmental standards and failure to tackle our greatest problem - climate change. This won't be a surprise to anyone in the Green Party. It's exactly what we expected. We had the right policies to create a green economy whilst providing a million new jobs and protecting public services. We now have to face five years of going backwards environmentally with nothing being done to deal with the most serious issues that face us.
