THERE is much irony that, in 2011, the United Nations’ International Year of Forests, the British Government decides to privatise our nation’s forests.

This privatisation is not designed to improve the service our trees offer us, or, more seriously, the way those trees are managed, but it is designed to raise £74.5m over the next five years.

Polls at the weekend show that between 71 per cent and 84 per cent are opposed to privatising forests.

The biggest concern is the loss of public access to our woodlands.

There is also a feeling that the whole concept of the sale is wrong. This land has been regarded as “common” for generations and so is not the Government’s to flog off. It belongs to us all.

There are concerns that the sale may end up costing us money in the long run, as the Government is committed to paying the new owners subsidies to plant the right sort of trees.

It seems likely that only three per cent of woodlands will end up in “big society” local ownership. The rest, like many privatised utilities, will finish in the hands of multinationals that have their headquarters abroad, their eyes on the bottom line and their hearts anywhere but in the local communities they are supposed to serve.

It is said that the biggest purchasers will be the power companies who would use the wood as biomass. They would be encouraged by further Government subsidies to burn it to produce green energy. This fuels the impression that the sale has not been thought through.

And then there is the hypocrisy behind the sale – not just of the Liberal Democrats who trumpetted their opposition to similar plans in Scotland, but whose votes will be required to get the measures through.

The real hypocrisy is that in our efforts to stop global warming, we are preaching to developing countries to stop cutting down their rainforests to make money they desperately need – but at the same time we will be selling off our own forests to make money for ourselves.