New pledges are easy. Action isn't

TWO ANNOUNCEMENTS last week – one by Michael Gove and the other by Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey. Coffey says that in the future everyone will live within a 15-minute walk of a green space. How politicians love a pious pledge, something they can promise to “deliver” but which everybody will have forgotten about within minutes.

- 

Coffey says that nature will be at the heart of every government decision from now on. Rivers, coastline and hedges will be restored to their paradisiacal glory thanks to her Environmental Improvement Plan. There will be a hedgehog for every garden and red squirrels frolicking in the trees (though not the little grey blighters obviously).

Britain will be transformed into the Garden of Eden. Not overnight you understand. But in the next quarter of a century... or thereabouts. So you will still find yourself swimming through sewage next summer.