Читать книгу Sorry, But Has There Been a Coup: and other great unanswered questions of the Cameron era - Steve Lowe - Страница 10

Will they come back for the trees?

The Tory Party had been out of office for 13 years. It had been slavering to get back in, to get the country back on course after all the New Labour insanity. It knew what it needed to do. It needed to privatise the forests. It needed to get those trees. Fast!

The trees just hadn’t been working hard enough. Yeah, they’d grown. Yeah, some of them had been chopped down. But it had all been quite a slow process.

There are powerful forces that want those trees and have been working hard behind the scenes, for the trees. ‘Let us not delay,’ said the Tories. ‘Get the trees! Get the trees!’

But the trees were well-defended. The trees had hidden strength. People liked the trees. So then, almost as soon as they had set out towards the trees, the Tories ran away from the trees. Back! Back! Run away! Run away from the trees! Run away!

Many referred to this hasty retreat from the trees as a U-turn – as evidence that the government did not know what the fuck it was doing in any respect. George Osborne was quick to put them right: ‘I don’t think it was a sign of weakness. I think it was a sign of strength.’

Yes: running towards trees and then running away from trees. It is the very definition of weird… I mean strong.

So, then they hit upon the cunning idea of privatising the entire countryside – which includes the trees.

Ripping up the planning legislation was a bold move, alienating the Telegraph and the National Trust. But trees is trees is progress.

Its opponents have pored over the National Planning Policy Framework, strangely missing a tiny footnote buried towards the back, denoted with a † † †: ‘The default answer to development proposals is yes – particularly if the land includes trees.

‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! You will never foil us! Never!’