Which is greenest? England’s forest estate or an electric estate car?

If you can afford to spend £28,000 on an electric car, our Government will give you a big fat cheque for £5000 as part of a £400m package to subsidise the nascent electric car market.

Selling off 15 percent of England’s forest estate will raise a paltry £100m.

Electric cars - which are, in fact, coal-powered - shift emissions away from source but don’t solve congestion. Millions of electric cars will take up the same space as millions of cars powered by petrol. Millions more cars on the road will only have freedom of movement if more roads are built. The Department for Transport predicts congestion to increase by at least 54 percent within 23 years.

Roads destroy countyside. You know, like woodlands.

Best to get woods out of public ownership, then. And this is what the Government is trying to do, although the bigger-than-expected protests against the sell-off have caused Cameron and chums to have second thoughts.

Last week the Government temporarily suspended its plans to take 15 percent of the public forest estate out of state control which would have generated up to £100m. And a consultation paper from the “greenest Government ever” that was seeking “a range of ownership and management options for the remaining 85 percent of the estate” will be scrapped, believes the BBC.

Do you think the Government might have had its priorities wrong over all this? Yes? How about signing 38 Degrees’ petition to ’save our forests’. Despite Cameron’s climb-down, our forests are not saved yet.