The Chancellor, George Osborne, spoke to the Institute of Directors this week. He cannot have been reading his speech very carefully - he seems to have missed a word. He said:
"On planning, one of the great obstacles to growth that no government has had the courage to tackle, we are now shifting the balance from delay and objection towards development and expansion."
Surely he meant to add the word ‘sustainable’ before saying 'development'?
But this wasn't the only nugget which caught my eye:
"On regulation, in this Budget we stopped £350m of costly business regulations. Vince Cable and I have now imposed a moratorium on new domestic regulations on small businesses."
Why is it that politicians across the political spectrum see deregulation as a badge of honour? To be honest, I am still slightly in a state of shock over the red tape challenge - with the public being asked if hard-won environmental legislation should be scrapped. If you have not done so yet, why not express your concern to the Business Secretary, Vince Cable.
If only more politicians saw it is as a badge of honour to stand up for the environment. Caroline Spelman deserves applause for this statement yesterday:
"The idea of being the greenest government ever isn’t a sound-bite or a quick fix solution. It’s about embedding the value of our environment and its resources in the economy and our national consciousness. Forever".
Enough, I'm off to see some wildlife at the RSPB's Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire today. That should cheer me up.
This is sickening - as nature-lovers we need to show them that people in England care about more than just economic growth.
What's almost worse is that they are utter hypocrites. For a government with a de-regulatory agenda, who tell us that you don't need to legislate to show you're serious about something, they are driving through an awful lot of legislation to leave their mark - the Public Bodies Bill, the Localism Bill, NHS reform...