Standing up for Nature
There was a bit of a fuss last week when the government, it was revealed, stopped the publication of NHS budget data – expected to be shockingly bad news – because Whitehall is in ‘electoral purdah‘. Now, as I recall, the purdah rules are really there to stop government putting out lots of good news…
The 2010 Conservative Party manifesto was quite good on the environment but the 2015 version was pretty awful. How does this one shape up? Here are my thoughts on likes and gripes (restricted to the environmental issues): Good things: it’s a nice blue colour ‘The United Kingdom will lead the world in environmental protection. As…
By the end of this week it will be manifest how poor is the grasp of environmental issues by our leading political parties. I am not expecting that any of them will reach the standards of the Green Party’s environmental manifesto. The Liberal Democrats: usually have some good things on the environment in their manifesto…
This is an interesting article by Warwick Lightfoot, Director of Research and Head of Economics and Social Policy at Policy Exchange. Unsurprisingly, from the Policy Exchange, it is strong on the view that leaving the EU will increase competition and therefore allow food prices to drop. This would be good news for consumers – that…
There is dancing in the streets of El Rocio this morning as news spreads of the reprimand given to the UK government (esp Defra) by the EU over the poor job done by the UK to protect blanket bogs from burning. Blanket bogs don’t prosper under a scorched earth strategy and all this crap about…
The Defra 25-year Nature Strategy is delayed – that’s not a great surprise, Defra has more or less ground to a halt on nature. The delay will be due to several factors: there is no discernable interest in wildlife conservation from any Defra minister – nor any sign of aptitude, experience or knowledge of the…
A few updates and things that caught my eye or my ear: That excellent blog, Raptor Persecution UK, is 7 today – Happy Birthday! the dawn chorus is getting going – Song Thrushes dominate the sound when I pick up the milk bottles from my doorstep in the morning new US Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke,…
I wrote to my MP asking him to pass on my approval of what George Eustice, the agriculture minister, said about funding for grouse moors in his remarks at the Oxford Farming Conference. Here is the reply. It doesn’t say that much, but MPs, ministers, in fact all of us, like being told that we…
David Mitchell, or David Mitchell Coren as we might call him, wrote an excellent column on telling the truth yesterday. One of his points, with which I agree, is that the good guys need to be squeaky-clean in this so-called post-truth age. We will only live in a post-truth age if we allow truth to…
The disappearance of income support for grouse moors in a post-Brexit world is apparently on the cards – and is a sound policy route to follow as a small aspect of making our money work better for taxpayers, consumers and farmers alike. But the other side of the coin is that more money should be…