Editor John McNee has his say.

EXCITED for the general election?

I bet I can guess your answer. I bet at the very mention many will be itching to turn the page with no interest in reading my half-baked ideas on the subject.

One of the complaints levied against Forestry Journal (not that there are too many, I assure you) is that we devote too many pages to politics – coverage of the latest announcements from government, the APPG meetings, Confor Policy Conference and so on.

But ask yourself: if we didn’t publish what the politicians are saying about forestry, who would? You might very well argue that it makes not a blind bit of difference to anything that happens in the real world, and to that I say… Actually I don’t have a rebuttal to that. Come back to me another time.

Boris Johnson ... remember him? Boris Johnson ... remember him?

In any case, you won’t find politicians talking too much about forestry in this issue as it seems none of them have very much to say.

What a marked difference to 2019, when our political leaders were enthusiastically outdoing each other with their pledges about blanketing the country with trees.

Boris Johnson (remember him?) promised 30 million trees planted between 2020 and 2025. Jo Swinson of the Lib Dems (remember her?) offered to double that figure to 60 million, while Labour under Jeremy Corbyn (gosh this feels like a long time ago, doesn’t it?) put forward a plan for 300 million trees by 2025, 1 billion by 2030 and 2 billion by 2040.

Which makes the Green Party’s pledge to plant 70 million between 2020 and 2030 look positively pedestrian.

I guess we’ll never know if any of those grand ambitions from the other parties could have been realised. The Conservatives won, so we can only judge them and, no matter which way you look at it, it hasn’t been good.

Would a Labour government, led by Sir Keir Starmer, make any difference to forestry? Would a Labour government, led by Sir Keir Starmer, make any difference to forestry? (Image: Keir Starmer)

But what’s marked is the contrast between how big a deal forestry (at least, the tree-planting end of it) was to the parties then, compared to now. I haven’t heard a squeak about it so far.

Will that change in the next month? Don’t hold your breath.