SIR: I wasted an hour and a half of my life last week tuned into what was described as a Hampshire COP26 Summit. One would imagine that the organisers might have expected that such a title would attract a thinking and concerned audience. In fact, it turned out to be a Conservative Party greenwash propagandafest - patronising, self-congratulatory and ill-informed peddling of twaddle. That a few hapless and well-intentioned speakers had somehow been drawn into this travesty of a ‘webinar’, did not make up for the ‘blah, blah, blah’ of Minister Rebecca Pow (the usual ‘world-beating’ cant) and Hampshire MPs, Mary Miller, Caroline Dinenage and Suella Braverman (I could not endure the thing long enough to hear Flick Drummond and Steve Brine).

Then I pick up something that came through the door from the Liberal Democrats, called Spark (not an auspicious title as the planet starts to burn). This informed me that “the Conservatives are failing miserably to meet their commitments on tackling global warming”. Obviously true. But then “LibDems take climate change seriously”. Really?

A Lib Dem Council has voted for expansion of Southampton Airport. Winchester’s Lib Dem majority city council has just approved an expansion of car parking, which will have the effect of multiplying car trips and increasing carbon emission. It backs a Winchester Movement Strategy which appears now to be mostly about classic road-builders’ ‘predict and provide’, making provision for as much as 66 per cent extra parking. So not the least sign that either the city council or the county council are seriously addressing emissions from road transport in their Climate Emergency Action Plans.

There are shades of hypocrisy in the main political parties, when pots and kettles compete to condemn the other’s blackness, but the thin shade of greenwash is all the rest of us see.

Chris Gillham,

Upper High Street,

Winchester