A Tree in the Hand...

Daveybloke's badger-busting Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, has so far overcome his climate change denial as to propose a new scheme for destroying ancient woodland. Under the rubric of "biodiversity offsetting" (a bit of jargon on which I can scarcely improve), Paterson intends to allow developers to chop down anything they please, provided they plant lots of other trees somewhere else. Assuming the Government actually bothers to enforce Paterson's BO rather than simply getting out of the way of business, this will mean that "the present generation of UK residents would lose out", but will result in an enormous increase in houses, roads, "major projects" and trees. Best of all, whenever developers started chopping down the new trees, Paterson's BO would mean they would have to plant yet more trees, and so on and so on until the entire country became a badgerless paradise of houses, roads, major projects and trees. Obviously, it is better to have a hundred new trees than one old tree, for much the same reason as a hundred toddlers are better than one adult, particularly in a crisis.