Last year DEFRA carried out a consultation on general licences in England – this was forced by the successful Wild Justice legal challenge of the Natural England general licences. Over 4,000 responses were received , which is quite a lot, but not so many as to justify such a long wait for any decisions from…
Category: THE POLITICS: Ministers, MPs, government policy
DEFRA begins to reply
In response to the e-action organised by Wild Justice, Hen Harrier Action and the RSPB, voters in England are beginning to receive, via their MPs, responses from DEFRA. Having given DEFRA the opportunity to impress us all with their grasp of the subject and their fast pace of policy action these responses are very similar…
UK Biodiversity Indicators (4)
Following three earlier blog posts today (here, here and here). This is a quite spectacular graph showing the decline in public sector biodiversity spend in the UK over the last decade or so. There has been a steady increase in expenditure by NGOs but not enough to fill the spending gap left by our taxes…
UK Biodiversity Indicators (2)
Following on from an earlier blog. Maybe we’ve decided that once-common birds that live on farmland don’t matter to us any more (but if we have, when did that happen and I’m not signed up to that view) but we must care about the best places for wildlife and priority species – surely? So let’s…
UK Biodiversity Indicators 2020 (1)
The annual, official report on UK Biodiversity indicators was published on Thursday to its usual blaze of apathy – so well done to the Guardian for noticing and commenting. Funnily enough, there was no DEFRA press release and this report was not featured on the DEFRA webpage. It is, of course, a mixture of good…
Thinking of going for a walk this weekend?
I’ve heard the Peak District National Park, our oldest National Park, is very nice… Try the road from Manchester to Barnsley (which is also the road from Barnsley to Manchester) near the Woodhead Pass, perhaps… And the area south of the main road along Middle Small Clough looks nice from the road … Well, admittedly…
Amendments
There is a widespread belief among the population as a whole that MPs are ignorant wastrels. So give me your views on these proposed amendments to the Environment Bill, please. How far did you get? There is a lot of good stuff in here, little of which will probably get adopted by government. Did you…
Heading to 60,000 signatures
The Wild Justice Badger e-petition is heading for 60,000 signatures. I always think that’s a more useful milestone than 50,000. At forty-something thousand, people think you’re halfway there, and at 50,000 you are, and then at fifty-something thousand it still feels as if you are ‘about halfway’. But at 60,001 there are ‘only’ 39,999 signatures…
My article in the New European
A promise from Boris – piffle-Pfeffel?
When you are told something by a habitual liar then you have to take it with a mountain of salt. About this amount… But don’t worry about this one because it adds up to nothing anyway. Our Prime Minister is promising to increase protected areas for nature from an alleged 26% to a hypothetical 30%…