The National Farmers’ Union has a petition about food standards: I want the food I eat to be produced to world leading standards. Our Government should ensure that all food eaten in the UK – whether in our homes, schools, hospitals, restaurants or from shops – is produced in a way that matches the high standards…
Category: THE POLITICS: Ministers, MPs, government policy
Shooting Badgers (1)
In the past two years, more than 67,000 Badgers have been killed under a government programme which claims to have as its aim the eradication of bovine Tb in cattle. About two thirds of these Badgers are shot (free shooting, sometimes called controlled shooting) and one third are trapped and then shot. Free shooting is…
Independence Day lessons
This video is doing the rounds of social media and brought a smile to my face. An American friend sent it to me. It’s clever and funny, and I suspect it is sufficiently well produced that it will be seen by Republican voters as well as Democrats, and therefore might influence the Presidential election. Using…
Press release from CIEEM on Johnson Speech
Response to the Prime Minister’s Green Recovery Speech CIEEM (Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management) is extremely disappointed to hear the Prime Minister’s words at Dudley this [Tuesday] morning. Despite heralding a green recovery and promising investment into a green future, the Prime Minister sent mixed messages by belittling the importance of biodiversity through his attribution…
First they came for the newts, then they came for the salmon, eels, shads and lampreys?
Here’s a very big example of what Dominic Woodfield wrote about in his excellent guest blog this morning. There’s a nuclear power station, Hinckley C, being built on the Severn Estuary and part of the conditions for it being built were to do with protecting fish which use the estuary and which might be sucked…
David Lindo and Caroline Lucas in conversation
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Tomorrow, Wednesday 24 June at 7pm, David Lindo (The Urban Birder) is in conversation with Caroline Lucas MP (the greenest MP in Westminster? by miles?). Join their conversation about making a change, diversity and our future relationship with nature. The event is free, open to all and is hosted online at theurbanbirderworld.com/live-webinars in partnership with…
Benyon review on Highly Protected Marine Areas
This review, which is quite important, was published on World Ocean Day two weeks ago. It gained a lot of acclaim at the time and this was pretty well-deserved. The group (which I said at the time it was set up, back in July 2019, looked like a good one), chaired by former Environment minister…
Political wildlife protection
People say that wildlife protection should not be a political matter – by which they usually mean a party political matter. But it is, and it should be. Let’s examine the protected status given to Mountain Hares in Scotland by the Scottish Parliament yesterday after a vote of MSPs. First, it was a great result!…
What will Boris say?
By now I would normally have done my first visit to each of my two Breeding Bird Survey squares. But under the current circumstances I thought I ought to let the time pass and check what the instructions were on the BTO website. Here they are: So, I was doing the right thing by not…
BASC writes to George Eustice
BASC is asking DEFRA to take notice of them – that’s usually what BASC press releases are about. This one has an inherent flaw in it though, although I expect that they will get away with it. What is that flaw? BASC asks DEFRA to take account of shooting’s conservation benefits when considering what to…