pic: Arusha Basu

Groups such as Greenpeace, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Green Party along with more than 800,000 members from Wildlife trusts slammed George Osborne’s autumn statement last month as a “backwards budget” and a “formula for failure.”

If you were to look back to the last general election, the irony is rich – David Cameron’s original promise made in May 2010 was to be “the greenest government ever.”

Chris Huhne may have been quick to swoop down and rescue Osborne, but the Green Party was equally quick to quip that the Chancellor was “colour blind when it comes to the green economy”.

But setting aside all the usual political point-scoring and carefully constructed responses, we are yet to see someone from the Coalition say specifically  that they are – or will be – doing more in the future towards protecting rural and urban England as well as cut down on carbon emissions in London.

The Green Party has a right to be angered by the broken promises of the Coalition. The Conservatives ran with slogan  ‘We’re green too’. It  won them green votes, but they have not kept their promise.

The coalition is biased towards big business. This has become evident all the way to the borough-level, where councils are willing to overlook environmental concerns while giving way to commercial interests.

For almost a decade, there have been plans to build an incinerator for waste reduction in Croydon and to prevent waste  from going to landfill. Despite continuous debate and opposition to a technology that has for long been proved to be archaic and harmful to the environment, the plan has gone forward to being approved by  Merton, Kingston, Sutton and Croydon.

When even regular councillors were excluded from the meeting to discuss the South London Waste Partnership, it became evident that on the whole, only commercial and private interests were being served.