I quite agree with the Greens and with local residents who object to the street lights being turned off. Many people are still on their way home when the lights go out. I welcome the proposal to reconsider the policy in Epping Forest but we should still have a care for the rest of Essex.

We can also agree that more advanced technology could save energy, and who would want to use more of our resources wastefully as we do now?

But my complaint, which I repeat, is that electricity has increased in price because of policies promoted by the Green Party, so they are least well placed to complain when the council tries to save money. Steven Neville for the Greens claims that subsidies for renewables are small – the way this works is complex but feed-in tariffs for so-called renewable sources are set at a multiple of the prices for traditional power generation. Fact!

There really is no “energy crisis”. There are abundant supplies of traditional energy sources and the only constraint on their better use are the rules brought in by the EU and our own politicians at the behest of green-ish campaigners.

Steven cannot resist introducing the climate change canard, which I would be delighted to debate (and at the General Election, maybe we can), but it had nothing to do with my criticism of the Green Party and street lights. I notice that Green Party leader Natalie Bennett says the scientific debate about climate change "is over" - as if scientific enquiry can ever be "over" - presumably the Greens still adher to the flat earth theory which prevails before Galileo? Would his "science" be the same as the Met Office science which in November last year predicted a dry winter?

Andrew Smith, UK Independence Party, prospective parliamentary candidate