Let us start by wishing Caroline Spelman well and thanking her for being a champion of biodiversity during her time at Defra. The outgoing Secretary of State did a good job on international biodiversity protection – and was notable for her own personal successes at the Nagoya meeting. Spelman lacked charisma and had the air…
Category: THE POLITICS: Ministers, MPs, government policy
Shuffle
The Bird Fair was great – and will have provided much inspiration for future blogs. I’ll come back to it soon but let’s change tack to politics. David Cameron, and everyone else, deserves a holiday, but the PM’s mind may be spinning over a rumoured reshuffle. Let me first say that I think that it…
Prof Sir John Lawton says…
…that the Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, is a ‘bloody idiot’ on the subject of wildlife protection. Sir John, or actually, I see, John Hartley Lawton, is a Vice President of the RSPB, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a good birdwatcher, was the last chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (deceased), is…
Is your MP in this list – mine isn’t?
The Rio+20 conference on sustainable development is happening right now (I’ve been blogging about it for the RSPB over the last 20 days). Stop Climate Chaos produced a Rio declaration and I asked my MP, Louise Mensch to sign up. I got a good detailed reply from Ms Mensch but I noticed that she didn’t…
Well done Zac!
Did you see Zac Goldsmith on Newsnight on Tuesday evening? If not, have a look (about 16 minutes in) because he was very good. As Jeremy Paxman sat in front of an image of green countryside Allegra Stratton spilled the beans on what the Treasury is thinking on the planning the system (read it here)….
NIAs again
Nature is everywhere, it’s all around us and it is in trouble in many places around us. When government was looking for areas to qualify as Nature Improvement Areas it had plenty of places from which to choose – 76 proposals came forward for the £7.5m funding that was available for just 12 sites. Those…
Letter from Defra
I am grateful to Defra Minister Richard Benyon for this reply to a letter which my MP, Louise Mensch, sent to him on 15 December concerning implementation of the EU Birds Directive. The letter asked about farmland birds, hen harriers and marine protected areas. The Minister’s civil servants have written him quite a detailed reply…
Osborne says…
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne issued a heart-felt cry for help when he warned against allowing his “anti-environment culture” to take hold in Britain. “There are those of us who are trying to create an anti-environment culture in Britain – and we have to be stopped. At stake are not pay packages for a…
Is this what the Lib Dems are for….?
The news that the government is to consult on the possibility of a major hub airport in the Thames Estuary comes as no surprise following the Chancellor’s autumn statement but does open up a new environmental battle. I’m still waiting to hear from The Treasury, via my MP Louise Mensch, on why they think that…
Blue, green and Goldsmith.
Zac Goldsmith, describes (in yesterday’s Guardian) the view of some in the government, that ‘addressing the environmental crisis can only happen at the expense of the economy‘ as being ‘a flawed position‘. He goes on to attack the ‘hugely controversial proposals to reform planning‘ as being based on a weak argument since ‘With some 250,000…