Simon Jones, Shoeburyness Confelicity candidate, speaks out about the hypocrisy of Labour's plan to build on the green belt and what is being asked of us all to save the environment

I’m standing at the bin, rinsing out a pasta sauce jar, and it suddenly hits me:

What is the actual point of this

…when they’re happily ploughing the green belt flat to build “Fox Hollow Park” where the fox and the hollow used to be?

I’m here scraping baked-on tomato off glass like I’m saving the planet single-handed, while somewhere a bloke in a suit is pointing at a field going, “Yeah, whack 800 houses on that, we’ll stick a tiny playground in the corner and call it ‘public open space’.”

We get lectures: “Do your bit. Recycle. Shorter showers. Turn off the lights.”

Cool. Done. I’m basically living like it’s wartime.

But then you look out of town and there’s a digger chewing through hedgerows that have been there longer than most of the streets.

They tell us it’s all “sustainable development”. Apparently “sustainable” now means:

• Cut down the trees

• Concrete the field

• Stick the word “eco” in the brochure

• Plant three sad saplings next to the car park

Job done. Planet saved. Cheers lads.

Meanwhile, I’m sorting my rubbish into more categories than my phone contacts:

• General waste

• Recycling

• Food bin

• Soft plastics

• The Mysterious Pile Of Stuff I’m Pretty Sure Is Illegal To Throw Away

If I get it wrong, I half expect the bin men to kick my door in and read me the Riot Act over a rogue yoghurt lid. But if a developer wants to rip up 70 acres of countryside? No problem. Just upload 90 documents with titles like “Amended Biodiversity Addendum v3 FINAL FINAL” and hope no normal human being has the will to open them.

We’re told there’s a housing crisis, which somehow always means “build on the green belt” and never “tax the people sitting on ten empty properties” or “renovate the thousands of places already rotting away”. Nah. Much easier to flatten a field, throw up boxes, and sell them at prices that make your eyes water.

Then they say the locals are “standing in the way of progress”.

Mate, I’m not against progress. I’m against pretending “progress” means turning every town into one endless estate with a Greggs and a traffic jam.

Here’s the bit that really stinks: they make us feel guilty.

Forgot to recycle a can? Monster.

Left the TV on standby? Climate criminal.

Bulldozed a whole chunk of the countryside? “Balancing competing priorities in a challenging economic climate.”

Still, tomorrow I’ll rinse out another jar. Not because I think it’ll stop them, but because I’d like to be able to look my kids in the eye and say:

“When they were paving over the fields, I wasn’t the one filling black bags with crap and shrugging.

I did my bit.

They’re the ones who tarmacked Bambi and called it ‘Green View Close’.”