SAJID JAVID’S announcement that the government has engaged Bank of America Merrill Lynch to advise on a sell-off of most of the Green Investment Bank (GIB) is a national disgrace.

His claim that the bank’s current profitability justifies its sale to the private sector ignores the reasons for establishing the GIB in the first place.

The bank was a central plank of the Tories’ 2010 general election manifesto back when David Cameron was projecting a different kind of Tory Party.

A succession of environmentally friendly photo-opportunities and Cameron’s pledge of a greenest-ever government seduced many voters into believing that the Tory leopard had changed its spots.

He was said to have drawn a line under the hard-faced “nasty party” in favour of a modern, more humane and responsible outfit that embraced previous Tory anathemas such as LGBT rights and climate change.

Collaboration with the Liberal Democrats helped the Tories to burden the working class with the costs of bailing out the private banks.

Now liberated from any need to listen to Nick Clegg’s depleted band, the Tories are determined to press ahead single-mindedly with their pro-City profits agenda.

Javid says that the GIB, which has invested in wind power, bio-energy, and renewal projects, will be able to increase its lending powers through full access to capital markets.

But he knows that the bank was set up precisely because private banks were loth to provide seed corn for green energy projects.

City speculators have, unlike their counterparts in Germany and elsewhere, been obsessed for decades with quick and certain returns on their capital.

Despite rhetoric about taking risks and backing their judgement with capital, banks and other supposed “investors” prefer safe bets based on state-financed or guaranteed projects.

Taking over publicly owned natural monopolies or buying into the NHS and other public-sector operations through PFI and profits-assured schemes has been more to their taste than genuinely risking capital.

The idea that GIB privatisation will tempt these parasites to put their money where their mouths are and to really encourage green energy projects is beyond belief.

Those who get their hooks into the GIB will be more likely to milk its assets before tossing it aside.

Had commercial banks wanted to invest heavily in renewables, they could have done so at any time when they were raking in money hand over fist, but they didn’t.

They exported earnings overseas for speculation in the immediately profitable but foreseeably doomed US subprime mortgage market/scandal, handing top bankers massive bonuses and then demanding state aid after this glorified pass-the-toxic-parcel game turned to ashes.

E3G chief executive Nick Mabey, whose think tank was instrumental in helping establish the GIB, is right on the money in noting that the green bank has provided investment in the real economy while commercial banks have retreated into their shells.

Handing over GIB to such cowboys will see a similar conservatism impose itself on this welcome initiative and stifle it.Such economic vandalism speaks volumes for Cameron’s pie-crust promises on the environment.

The PM and Chancellor George Osborne are obsessed with reducing the government deficit as rapidly as possible by slashing benefits for the poor and trimming public spending by, for example, undermining any prospect of greening the economy by cancelling rail electrification of the Midland mainline.

For the Tories, people’s living standards and making the world fit to live in come a poor second to easy profits for their friends in the City.