This book has little to do with wildlife and its conservation, just like two of its characters, Therese Coffey and her bestie, Liz Truss. However, unlike the late unlamented Secretaries of State for the Environment, Henry Morris, is a friend of wildlife and a friend of mine so I’ll happily plug his latest excellent book…
Category: THE POLITICS: Ministers, MPs, government policy
Dear Mr Reed, 5 – who you should hear
Comments Off on Dear Mr Reed, 5 – who you should hear
Dear Mr Reed, I’m sure you have heard lots of views and advice since you were appointed shadow secretary of state about a year ago. They can’t all be right! How do you decide who is talking nonsense? I remember a meeting with Ed Miliband when I was one of a group of NGO people…
Dear Mr Reed, 4 – your five priorities
Dear Mr Reed, welcome to your new job. It all gets real now. Yesterday you set out your five priorities for Defra; clean rivers zero waste economy food security nature recovery reducing flood risk These are good as headlines and demonstrate more strategic thought than we have seen from the Tories in 14 years. Everybody…
Rachel Reeves’s speech
Rachel Reeves made a speech yesterday – click here – it sounded pretty good but the devils (and the angels) are always in the detail not the rhetoric. Who could argue with this sentence? ‘Over the weekend I made clear to Treasury officials that the manifesto commitments that we were elected on will be kept…
General election comments
I’d like to thank the Scottish Labour Party, the Lib Dems and Reform for delivering a massive Labour majority on such a small share of the vote. Voters in Scotland switched from SNP to Labour, voters in the southwest and elsewhere switched from Con to LibDem, voters all over the place switched from Con to…
Dear Mr Reed, 3, marches and manifestos
Dear Steve Reed, in just a week’s time you may be in your second day in your new job as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I hope so. As a Labour member I’ve been delivering leaflets for Lee Barron in Raunds, a small, ex-boot-and-shoe town in Northants, and in the Corby…
Dear Mr Reed, 2 – Badgers
Dear Steve Reed, in just over three weeks time you may well be Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. If so, that will give you great opportunities to make the world a better place and that must be an exciting prospect. However, one hot potato will be firmly on your desk –…
Dear Mr Reed, 1
Dear Steve Reed, just think, in a month’s time you may be in your second day in your new job as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. How will your first day in the job have gone? I’m a Labour Party member, living in the marginal seat of Corby in Northamptonshire, and…
Poor response from Rebecca Pow – the Minister ‘responsible’
The Westminster government is a busted flush – it does not do the big things right and cannot even do the small things. I wrote to my MP, Tom Pursglove, on 19 January – click here – to enquire about lack of progress by government on five straightforward matters on which simple government action is…
If this is a big announcement…
This is the smallest, least consequential, big announcement you will ever see. Alex Sayer claims that she has been working with some of ‘the top people in government’ to launch a new group at the Tory Party Conference in Manchester (aka ‘the end of the line’ conference). She claims that she has got friends –…