On green issues, Eric Pickles's actions show he is a petty dictator

Communities secretary Eric Pickles, appointed this week as the final arbiter of fracking applications across half of Britain, never misses an opportunity to play the part of the man of the people. Watch him in full flow, as I have, and you will find his speeches stuffed with folksy anecdotes and earthy phrases.

My favourite is well-known and from 2010: “It’s a basic right for every English man and woman to be able to put the remnants of their chicken tikka masala in their bin without having to wait a fortnight for it to be collected.”

Pickles is a master of rhetoric. But examine his actions and the supposed champion of localism – empowering communities – is revealed as no more than a petty dictator. Whether it’s bin collections, the mis-named “conservatory tax”, housing, allotments or onshore wind farms, Pickles has repeatedly overruled locally taken and supported decisions in favour of his own dogma.

On Wednesday, the latest in a long line of onshore windfarms was crushed by Pickles, despite approval from the planning authorities, As Mike Parker, at the windfarm’s developer, RWE Innogy UK, said: “Once again we have received refusal, going against the objective and reasoned judgment of an independent and qualified planning inspector.” Pickles might argue that he’s protecting the minority of the public that object to wind farms, but that doesn’t sound very democratic to me.

Pickles’s obsession with weekly rubbish collections has led to even greater trampling of public opinion. Horrified by what he dubbed “Tali-bin” – local authorities changing to collection routines fit for the 21st century – he threw a £250m bribe at them. Of the 353 local authorities just a single one applied for money to reinstate weekly collections.

So all those democratically-, locally-elected councils, of all political shades and with their fingers on the pulse of their communities, roundly rejected Pickles’s supposition about where people wanted to stick their curries. He was completely undeterred. Having failed to bribe locals into fulfilling his dogmatic fantasy, he announced in June that he wants to make it illegal to disagree with him, by requiring councils to meet a ‘minimum service standard’ of waste collection.

The need to build new houses has perhaps been the hottest potato Pickles has had to handle and again has has demonstrated contempt for those who fail to share his view. In 2012, he said he would strip local councils of their planning powers and hand them to a centralised planning inspectorate if they were too slow to allow new developments.

Characteristically, he coined a double-speak phrase for this removal of local power: “muscular localism”. He said: “There might be an element of muscular localism about this but good local authorities we will work together with. It is only those local authorities who frankly have been dragging their feet and being wholly unrealistic, operating in a kind of economic la la land, we will be dealing with.” Localism, it is clear, only stretches as far as local opinions that Pickles happens to share.

Allottment holders in Watford discovered the existence of Orwellian “good” localism and “bad” localism just last week, as Pickles contested their legal challenge to his decision to allow an area cultivated by locals since Victorian times to be built over.

The killing of the “conservatory tax” is another demonstration of how, for Pickles, dogma eats localism for breakfast. The policy, which even Pickles’s own department admitted did not affect the “vast majority” of conservatories, was to require homeowners to install simple, low-cost energy efficiency measures as a condition of planning permission for some building work.

The idea had been tested over five years by a Conservative-run council in Essex, next door to Pickles’s own constituency. “We have never got complaints,” the local building control officer told me at the time. Local officials visited Pickles’s department to deliver this good news in person. No matter. The policy to cut people’s energy bills, happily accepted by locals, was strangled at birth.

Pickles is now tasked with making the final judgement on controversial applications to explore for shale gas, a fledging industry which is being fast-tracked by a deliriously enthusiastic government. He has already stacked the case in favour of fracking, relative to wind power, thanks to less stringent planning rules and by placing the initial decisions not in the hands of local councils but more distant county councils.

Those hoping that fracking sites will be approved or turned down on the basis of local representation and evidence will not to find an ally in Pickles. For him, localism is meaningless unless it happens to back his personal prejudices.

I’ll give you a final example of Pickles’s pick-and mix localism: in 2003 Pickles defeated a proposed a residential care home for 114 elderly people. It was to be in Pilgrims Hatch, in his own constituency. Beware the petty dictator.