Forest U-Turn

Last week, the forest sell-off outrage made me wonder if it was all just a moral panic or actually potentially a good idea.
Now apparantely, David Cameron never liked the idea anyway (why was it going to happen then?) and the public didn't like it because they imagined all these big companies like Tesco buying the land, cutting down all the trees and selling the timber, and finally building environmentally unfriendly business in their place. But was it really necessary to completely scrap the idea?
The original plan was to "give the private sector, community and charitable groups greater involvement  in woodlands by encouraging a 'mixed model' of ownership."
Firstly, there weren't really many businesses interested in the land. For one, the space of a forest is far greater than the biggest Tesco Extra you could find so there would be hectares of spare land. Secondly, timber is just not a profitable trade in this country anymore. That's why we improt most of it from other countries - because it's far cheaper to, and their prices surpass anything our country could feasibily. The wood produced and sold in this country is predominantly a byproduct of coppicing. Instead of scrapping the idea, why not put safeguards in place to ensure it was only sold to environmental charities and the like? It was mainly organisations such as the National Trust who were interested in the land anyway, and they would be conserving it, not destroying it. With regard to this, the public are just as bad as the government. They are happy to slate everything the government does or proposes, but not many people have any alternative ideas. And how many people actually thought it through before they signed the petition? It's just another case of - 'oh my god, the government's ruining everything, we must stop this.' We don't trust the government, but we would rather them be in charge of our forests than NGOs which have proven forestry experience? This has resulted in a workable proposal being completely disregarded - why does it always have to be YES or NO? It could have been altered to allow the forests improved management. Now I'm not a Lib Dem or Conservative supporter by a long shot, but I wish people would stop and think - instead of jumping into the deep end of attack.