1/5 The People's Plan for Nature: a crackpot scheme by top UK charities that will kill the UK
A multimillion-pound project designed by idiots at RSPB, NT and WWF will destroy countless livelihoods. Tell your MP and everyone you know that it's complete bollocks.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the National Trust have produced what they call the People's Plan for Nature.
The manifesto is the fruit of a 'People's Assembly', made up of 103 supposedly random members pruned from 33,000 RSVPs to invitations to create new laws that will save the UK's plants and animals.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, its former editor Charles Moore raises concerns about the attempt to bypass an established system of governance and rule-making: “These few, these happy few, then listened at conferences to 'a wide range of evidence and case studies over four weekends', advised by 40 experts. Guided by 'experienced facilitators', who operated 'a rapid democracy process'.”
Despite an enticing £800 payment to participants - plus expenses – Moore points out "the take-up of the invitation had been strikingly low, less than 1% accepted".
The manifesto the charities produced insists we need to rethink the way everyone lives based on new countryside and seaside regulations they want to enforce, including what food we buy, where we fish, how we farm, who owns the land or sea and how it is managed. They claim the changes are needed or nature will perish. They are presenting the plan to politicians to try to get it weaved into the fabric of British society.
The BBC television series Wild Isles acts as a party political broadcast for their initiative. The lavish production was funded by the charities and broadcast by the BBC. That raised suspicions about their agenda and the credibility and impartiality (again) of the publicly-funded media corporation. The first episode went out on March 12th, 10 days before the plan was published.
"I've never heard of something like this happening in the UK before," says edtech investor Richard Taylor. "Their power is so enormous and their funding is so enormous that they're able to do things in a way that really only governments used to be able to do."
Leaders of the WWF, RSPB and NT declare: “The UK is in the bottom 10% of countries globally for protecting nature.” It's a figure frequently repeated by the three organisations and celebrity naturalists. Many studies disagree, including one by Yale University that ranks the UK 23rd out of 180 in terms of how good countries are at "retaining natural ecosystems and protecting the full range of biodiversity within their borders".
The figure waved around by the charities comes from Natural History Museum computer models. On its website, there's a list of "assumptions and limitations" in the modelling, including assuming "human pressures (land use change and intensification, human population growth and landscape simplification) have caused the differences we see in biodiversity", while recognising "these are not the only drivers of biodiversity change".
As climate scientists have proved countless times, computer models are not reality and are frequently used to promote fear rather than fact. In their joint statement about the TV show, the charity heads quote an unproven claim by the United Nations, that “there are just seven years left to halt and reverse the loss of our natural world”. Naturally, that's according to computer models.
Moore says of Wild Isles: “I imagine it will act as a recruiting sergeant for the organisations involved.” No doubt many will be prepared to volunteer in the fight for the future.
The crux of the People's Plan is a 'Calls to Action' section, packed with demands for the government, local authorities, NGOs, "food businesses" and the public. Its writers make clear it's going to evolve and adapt as the science and evidence changes, meaning everything in the presentations can eventually be added without warning by a "Ministry of Nature" – one of the things they're asking for.
For example, Rhianna Rees, coordinator for the Seaweed Academy, introduced the assembly to the SLO (social licence to operate) system, which sounds a lot like China's social credit system.
"You need to have that social support from communities, you need to have local input that is positive," says Rees, adding that "it's nice to know that we have to obtain that social licence to operate before we can conduct business", without explaining why. SLOs mean if some locals don't like what you do, whether it's shooting grouse, basket weaving or water skiing, nobody can do business with you because you won't be allowed one.
Not all the visions presented were so authoritarian. Ella Saltmarshe, co-founder of the Longtime Project, admitted aboriginal tribes told her when they stop managing some land, nature declines, so often human intervention is needed.
She didn't bring up comparisons to gamekeepers though.
Radhika Borde from Leeds University called it "environmental injustice" if land managers are prohibited from continuing practises they've been doing for hundreds of years.
Again, no comparison to heather burning or any other successful land management techniques practised by gamekeepers and others in the UK for generations.
The only speaker remotely connected to gamekeeping - and one of the few to nature – was crofter of the year 2020 Helen O'Keefe. She complained that crofters like her were getting squeezed out of remote areas by people raking in cash from taxpayer-funded government green subsidies.
"Our common grazings are… under threat from people trying to profit from the carbon and biodiversity crisis or people who want to rewild them just because they think it's the best thing to do," says O'Keefe. "I think it's really important to keep crofting alive, though not only to crofters who produce food while preserving biodiversity, but crofting is a crucial part of highlands and islands culture."
The 40 or so speakers recited school textbook 'green' misinformation. Oxford University's Nathalie Seddon insisted we live in a "rapidly warming world", ignoring the plateau of temperatures from the past 10 years.
Natural England chief lunatic Tony Juniper warned of extreme weather events, another climate change myth, according to the Met Office, which says “there is nothing to suggest maximum wind speeds have persistently changed in recent decades.“.
Wilder Solent's Tim Ferrero fretted about the sea level, which rises and falls in millimetres over decades but, we're told, is swallowing up vulnerable island nations. Since the fear-mongering began in the 1990s, nobody on this planet has lost their lives, homes or livelihoods because of minuscule changes in Earth’s temperature.
Naturally, the plan of the charities is designed to work in tandem with the UK government's highly-criticised net zero pledge. Its writers frequently mention long-term goals. Clearly they have been preparing this campaign for a long time.
NEXT: 2/5 Food versus nature: guess which side the RSPB, WWF and National Trust are on?