4/5 Slavery, sausages, seaweed and the flaws in the People's Plan for Nature's business model
In short, there isn't one, but that hasn't stopped woke wildlife charities trying to take over corporate boardrooms, backed by a vegan dragon, in their battle to ban common sense.
Deborah Meaden has been voted the scariest member of TV's Dragon's Den, the show where successful business people shred the dreams of plebby entrepreneurs who think they’ve got what it takes to join them. She’s sent many back home traumatised after telling them their life-changing brainwave is worthless crap.
However, her support for the People's Plan for Nature has left her with not just egg on her face, but sausages.
On the World Wide Fund for Nature's Call of the Wild podcast promoting the scheme, the normally frosty, calculated Meaden turns hysterical when discussing the effect she says the Wild Isles TV series has had on companies.
"I've seen a real shift in business, in terms of talking about biodiversity, but I still feel it's in this place of not really understanding the part that it can play," Meaden babbles. "I hear it and my people care about it. My consumers are worried about, and Wild Isles has really pumped this up. I cannot tell you the difference in the conversations I've had in the last few weeks because suddenly they're having to pay attention because their customers are talking about it."
She “cannot tell you“ because these conversations never happened.
Meaden's warning did become reality recently though, but not following the People's Plan for Nature playbook, which wants everyone to stop eating meat and switch to supposedly climate-friendly processed plant-based produce.
In May 2023, British sausage maker Heck scrapped its whole range of vegan sausages and burgers because it was (perhaps following Meaden’s advice) listening to its customers, who say they don't want them. An experienced businesswoman with her finger on the pulse, Meaden should have spotted this trend, as Heck is not the first company to trim vegan lines for the simple reason they're not selling.
The cultish vegan movement, which numbers less than a million out of UK's 70+ million population, is losing the battle for hearts and stomachs. This year's "veganuary" showed a spectacular drop in interest. Most people know real meat is cheaper, tastier and healthier.
Radhika Borde of Leeds university insisted people's tastes must change to accommodate the new way of farming outlined in the plan. Originally from India, she shared examples of farming in her home country, which has a shockingly high rate of farmer suicides.
To convince the People's Assembly that current tastes are wrong, she asked members to think about a time when the Western desire for products was fulfilled by traders travelling around the world enslaving people. Borde didn't say exactly when that was but compared spice trading in India with deforestation in the Amazon, itself not the planet-destroying issue the media often claims it is.
In the presentations, the fishing industry came under fire, with fishermen blamed for low stocks and habitat destruction. Nobody raised any negative points about wind turbines. Offshore, their construction wipes out life nearby and while operating, the constant vibration ensures very little will ever settle there - even seabirds steer clear.
Rhianna Rees from Seaweed Academy reinforced Borde's insistence that people's tastes must change. She suggested everyone should start eating seaweed because it's popular in parts of East Asia: "Seaweed in Asia is eaten every day, out here not so much but we're starting to see more variety and more acceptability over here. So eating seaweed and pesto or having them in sort of flakes or even having them as an alternative to spaghetti."
Rees summed up the short-sightedness of the green sector by failing to understand basic facts about a topic she's supposedly specialised in. She completely ignored the devastation caused by turbine farms, turning the lack of fishable waters into a positive, saying they are "great to minimise fishing". Her presentation strayed into ludicrous territory when she suggested future cargo ships will be "operated by wind instead of diesel or petrol", a completely unrealistic scenario.
At the heart of the People's Plan is reducing the size of livestock farmland. This is also part of the government's flawed net zero plan, which would require up 12% of UK land to be turbine farms if the country was to ditch fossil fuels completely. No prizes for guessing where that extra land will come from. The "official" calculation that less than 1% of the land is needed is a pipe dream.
The enormous habitat destruction required to build turbine farms on land and offshore (5% supposedly required for net zero) is contrary to the aims of the People's Plan, which is probably why the many problems with turbines are overlooked. Besides land for the windmills, hundreds of miles of pylons will be needed to transfer the energy round the country. Today, the entire wind movement has been spurred on by unsustainable subsidies and the misguided belief man can control the climate. There are calls for the government to put pylons on anyone's land wherever they're needed - no permission or subsidies needed.
In net zero estimates, 2.5% of land would need to be used for solar power, which is equally unsustainable and like wind, incapable of powering vital infrastructure like hospitals. Any business that involves manufacturing can't operate on such unreliable and weak sources of energy. Factories making products for Meaden and other business leaders will be moved to other countries with fewer restrictions, taking millions of jobs and money with them.
Businesses that stay will be scrutinised to ensure they're "nature friendly". Sue Pritchard of the Food, farming and Countryside Commission highlighted Cargill chicken producer as a bad company because it was blamed for pollution in the River Wye. Fair enough, most people would say, but the bigger problem, the media claims, is the company's links to a soy feed manufacturer accused of deforestation in Brazil. Pritchard labels food Cargill produces "unhealthy" and suggests companies making unhealthy food should not be allowed to operate. There should be a role for private financing in cleaning up the food industry, she insists.
While protecting wildlife habitats may seem high on the People's Plan for Nature agenda, it didn't stop the RSPB from using one of the presentations to plug its developer and business partner Barratt Homes. RSPB's head of business conservation strategy Nigel Symes spent more than nine minutes plugging the developer.
As a "business supporter", Barratt has been working with RSPB for years. While at Fieldsports Channel in 2020, we discovered the charity allowed the company to build houses on one of the few habitats in the UK suitable for cirl buntings. The Devon project saw taxpayers effectively giving the RSPB free land and free money because Barratt wanted to build an estate near Teignmouth. To ‘offset’ the habitat loss, the RSPB borrowed £500,000 to buy nearby Ash Hill. The developers then give Teignbridge council section 106 payments totally more than £600,000 to build on the cirl bunting habitat. At least some of the money was given to RSPB.
At the time, investor Richard Taylor said this about the arrangement: “Rather than benefiting the locals like buying the land itself to benefit rate payers, it’s giving money to the RSPB to buy land for itself, effectively passing money from public hands into charitable hands.”
In his People's Assembly presentation, Matthew Agarwala of the Bennett Institute in Cambridge, said success of the plan is based on the "quality of regulation and enforcement" of its restrictions and rules. Would that include the RSPB abandoning cirl bunting homes in favour of Barratt Homes? Probably not.
Speaker Ella Saltmarshe of the Longtime Project, heralded the laws and lawsuits that protect young people, including those who have not been born. First, the "ground-breaking" Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015. This bonkers policy introduced in Wales created a "legal obligation (for public bodies) to improve our social, cultural, environmental and economic well-being". She then celebrated the teenage scammers in Australia who successfully sued authorities for burning coal, arguing it has caused climate change that will harm people in the future.
It's a completely fabricated issue and a perversion of the course of justice, yet it's happening and companies may be next on the list. Have any of Deborah Meaden's companies created youth-damaging climate change? Probably not, but if a claim comes up, she'll most likely lose.
NEXT: 5/5 Conspiracy theory: the People's Plan for Nature is just a massive land grab