Labour and the Conservatives are today desperately trying to outdo each other with their green policies.

Tory leader David Cameron announces plans for council-tax reductions for people who install double glazing.

Prime minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown has doubled the duty paid by air passengers.

Politicians are trying to create the impression that they will deliver real improvements to the environment.

And it is all baloney. For as Messrs Brown and Cameron argue the finer points of carbon dioxide emissions, England is facing the biggest assault on its environment in living memory.

Forget airy-fairy green promises. Look at what is actually happening to England’s beloved Green Belt.

This barrier which has protected the English countryside for half a century, is at threat as never before. Conservation groups say 10,000 acres will vanish under Whitehall’s latest housing proposals.

The demand for homes, fuelled largely by a new wave of illegal immigration and the inevitable baby-boom that goes with it, is wiping out great swathes of the Olde England we knew and loved.

Once our meadows, woodlands and streams are concreted, culverted and built upon, they are lost forever. The land which was preserved, cherished and harvested by our ancestors is being ripped apart before our eyes .

The supreme irony is that this appalling environmental vandalism is being inflicted at the behest of politicians who blather endlessly about their environmental credentials.

It is happening under New Labour but Tories and Lib-Dems raise few objections and must share in the guilt.

Beware of politicians who claim to be on a mission to save the planet and then cheerfully send the bulldozers into the Green Belt.

Forget all the fine talk. Watch what they actually do. By their deeds we shall know them.

America sneezes and the UK shivers

Sub-prime lending. Remember those words. As the FTSE index drops like a stone and experts talk of hefty mortgage-rate rises, we will be hearing a lot more of them.

In the United States, banks and loan companies have been lending billions of dollars not only to prime borrowers with safe jobs but to poor folk who are unable to repay.

This sub-prime lending is a high-risk business and, as huge parts of it go belly-up, the ripples of panic and despair are sweeping the world’s stock markets.

We should not be surprised. The oldest rule of global economics is that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold.

Sub-prime lending 3,000 miles away could leave millions of Brits looking very peaky indeed.