RSPB press release – Tiny wasp helps protect island bird species threatened with extinction 

Tiny wasp helps protect island bird species threatened with extinction  One of the world’s rarest birds, Wilkins’ Bunting, has been handed a much-needed lifeline by a small species of parasitoid wasp.  Only found on the remote Nightingale Island in the South Atlantic, the bunting’s food source was threatened by an invasive alien scale insect.  Conservationists…

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…