A press release from legal firm Leigh Day: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 17 NOVEMBER 2016 Lawyers accuse MoJ of undermining people’s rights to challenge environmental projects The Government will publish proposals today (Thursday 17 November 2016) which lawyers claim will seriously restrict the rights of individuals to challenge in the High Court proposals which will…
Category: THE POLITICS: Ministers, MPs, government policy
Rory Stewart – this one is in your constituency
Rory Stewart has moved on from Defra but his legacy of inactivity on wildlife crime lives on and its impacts are manifest in his own constituency. A case of dead birds coming home to roost? I didn’t have any takers for my 100/1 bet that Rowan died of natural causes. It’s hardly surprising. He couldn’t…
Labour dropping the ball – maybe we need a register?
There are still large numbers of Labour MPs who haven’t even responded to their constitutents, after several weeks, on the subject of driven grouse shooting. This is pretty shocking since Labour has has a perfectly respectable standard response that has been sent out by other MPs since at least 24 August. That’s over six weeks…
Hedges – a good response
That looks good to me. Thank you Mr Eustice.
The grouse moor conception of national leadership
I can remember when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister – I remember my father couldn’t stand him because of something called Selective Employment Tax (funny what you remember isn’t it?) – but I certainly didn’t remember him referring to grouse moors. So I am grateful to a former RSPB colleague and reader of this blog…
The PM didn’t say this – but she should
We will see. The Conservative Party positioning on the hobby of driven grouse shooting is currently pretty much unreservedly in favour of it and apologists for it. When Defra, under the previous Prime Minister of course, responded to our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting after it passed 10,000 signatures, the then minister at Defra,…
Bit rude Ms Coffey
Dear minister I sent you a copy of my book, Inglorious – conflict in the uplands, over a month ago and haven’t yet received an acknowledgement. That’s very rude of you and Defra isn’t it? By the way, your predecessor was equally rude. Since I sent you that book, which has had rave reviews, and…
Therese Coffey left to pick up the pieces
The outgoing Defra ministers of Liz Truss and Rory Stewart, most particularly the latter, bear much of the responsibility for the shambles that is the government approach to Hen Harrier conservation in England. After today’s withdrawal of the RSPB from the hopeless Defra Hen Harrier Inaction Plan – because it is already clear that it…
Truss’s troubles
Schadenfreude is an unworthy feeling, but the fact that the Germans have a word for it and we do not is entirely to their credit, for it is a common human emotion. I thought we had seen the end of mentions of the hopeless Liz Truss on this blog as she exited to the Ministry…
The science about which Truss misled us
In a slightly shocking move last week (though I am not easily shocked) Liz Truss (formerly of Defra) announced she was not taking any notice of the report of the Lead Ammunition Group report (now published in full). She announced this after sitting on the report for 14 months, on the day a PM resigned…