JUST how long will this incinerator saga go on for?

It has been more than three years since Glouc-estershire County Council signed a contract with Urbaser Balfour Beatty for a £500 million incinerator at Javelin Park.

Since then, the Stroud district has been visited by umpteen waste management experts, experienced public debates chaired by newspaper editors and has seen thousands of protesters make their objections to the proposal very clear.

And yet even after a unanimous decision to reject the proposal by the very council which signed the contract to have the thing built in the first place, we still don’t seem any closer to getting a decision.

It was no surprise when UBB chose to appeal the decision – in fact, we think it is fair to say most people expected it.

But what we also expected was for secretary of state Eric Pickles to be able to do the job he has been elected for.

The SNJ wants Mr Pickles to be responsible for making this decision – we even ran a campaign in our paper asking for him to call it in.

But now it seems he is either unable or unwilling to do so.

Is he, as Labour and Green politicians say, being motivated solely by the Conservative Party’s desire to save their Stroud seat in May? Who knows?

But if Mr Pickles is planning on saying yes to the incinerator and is only delaying the announcement in order to protect Neil Carmichael and the rest of the Tory Party, then he should know it is a total waste of time and is likely to make people even angrier.

Wait three weeks or 32 weeks, it doesn’t matter, because if that incinerator is allowed to be built, even in another five years Stroud will still not have forgiven him for it.