Just a thought for Caroline Spelman

The political life is a somewhat harsh one.  One moment you can be at the top of the tree and the next you are almost nowhere.  If you lose your ministerial job then suddenly your views don’t count and your successor’s ears are the ones into which everyone seeks to whisper. I always used to…

Raptor round up

It would be perfectly possible to write about birds of prey, how wonderful they are and their troubled and shortened lives, every day on this blog.  I try not to do that because there are other sites that do it so well (raptor politics and raptor persecution Scotland) and because there are other big issues…

Plastic environmentalism

The Conference speech by the new Defra Secretary of State, Owen Paterson, will have been like discordant music to the ears of the environment movement. It would be very difficult to find many working in the environment who think that the EU is perfect but it would be almost impossible to find people who think…

Reshuffling the cards

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…

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…