5/5 Conspiracy theory: the People's Plan for Nature is a massive land grab
Nothing to see here, just charities that want to bankrupt you with dodgy property investments. They're funded by taxes, grants and your dead gran's legacy
A few years ago, legal lobby group Wild Justice declared victory for nature after forcing the government to restrict control of pest birds, leaving vulnerable species such as curlew and hen harriers with little protection. Wild Justice is made up of angry eco-extremist Chris Packham, raptor-death-spin-Dr Ruth Tingay and ex-RSPB heavyweight Mark Avery. I asked a gamekeeper why the three are obsessed with shutting down grouse moors when the land management benefits wildlife, such as the aforementioned ground-nesting birds.
"[Packham] is promoting conservation and yet his actions will have the opposite effect. I cannot see the sense in what Wild Justice have done, unless there's an ulterior motive," the gamekeeper explained. "The value of a grouse moor is based on the amount of grouse shot per acre... If grouse moors are no longer in place and there was no grouse shot, the land value would go rock bottom - nice and cheap for turbine men to come and buy them. There is a rumour that they're funding a lot of these charities... but that's just gossip."
The thought there may be a conspiracy to grab land would probably have been put on the shelf and forgotten about, except a day earlier I was told a similar theory by an angler, based on the RSPB refusing to classify a subspecies of cormorant, a seabird, as invasive.
For a couple of years, the RSPB had been flaunting its "nature's home" rebrand and threatening to expand the scope of its dubious protection to all animals - except people. The charity routinely begs for millions of pounds of taxpayer-funded grants to save bird populations then sits back and watches them die. The future looks bleak for UK wildlife if this embezzlement-fuelled neglect continues.
"If we conservatively assume there are now 20,000 inland cormorants (also known as Chinese cormorants) resident in the UK… and then assume that each one eats about half-a-kilo of fish per day, then that is over nine tonnes of freshwater fish being taken every day of the year," said the concerned angler. Rivers are valued by the amount of fish in them.
This subspecies was most likely brought to Europe from China by Dutch traders in the 1600s. The British Trust for Ornithology only noticed the birds living in Britain in the 1980s, says the angler. They should be considered an invasive species, he says, but the RSPB argues they have naturally extended their range.
While the RSPB is ignoring the invasive cormorant threat, it's been enthusiastically massacring invasive mice on Gough island in the South Atlantic. It's on a "mission to eradicate every single mouse on the island and make it a seabird paradise once again". Meanwhile on Orkney, it's spent millions of pounds trying to kill every invasive stoat there while ignoring the bigger problem of invasive geese, which are polluting drinking water and poisoning cattle then fleeing to RSPB reserves, out of the range of pest controllers.
"The RSPB were furious in 2004 when Labour MP Ben Bradshaw stated in parliament that licences would be granted to shoot 3,000 inland cormorants. The RSPB had not been consulted," our angler continued. "[In 2011] the coalition government of the time announced a DEFRA-led review titled Impacts of predation by fish-eating birds on inland fisheries... Taking part in the review were half a dozen conservation groups, including the RSPB. The Angling Trust was the only group representing anglers. Not surprisingly, the review decided not to add inland cormorants to the general licence and to keep the number of licences at 3,000."
Obtaining a licence to kill cormorants is complicated, so most years, the quota isn’t filled. The RSPB claims this is proof fishery owners and anglers don't care about controlling cormorants.
"I was granted a licence some years ago to kill cormorants on a section of the river Nene," our angler said. "I was allowed to shoot one cormorant each month for four months of the year, so four cormorants in total. Less than half-a-mile away there was a roost of over 100 cormorants. The licence also stated that I could only kill a cormorant if there were two or more present, so the undead one would go back to the flock and tell the others of the danger."
The system is useless, with cormorants ‘extending their range’ across the UK, decimating fisheries, rivers and biodiversity along the way. After dramatic drops in salmon and trout in Wales, there was another review in 2022. The Angling Trust should be leading the fight against inland cormorant chaos, but appeared to just sit back and let bird charities call the shots. Hence the finding; "Wild fish populations are affected by numerous factors aside from predation, making inferences about the impact of one pressure on fish stocks extremely difficult."
And this nugget of comedic nonsense; "Interactions between fish stocks and fish-eating birds are complex and large key evidence gaps persist." Fish-eating birds eat the fish. How complex is that?
The RSPB's stupidity and distaste for fish are not new - its State of Nature reports routinely ignore them. The 2016 version makes various claims about marine and river life, but adds fish were "excluded from the analysis". It then says there are fewer fish. How would it know if it didn’t study them? In RSPB newspeak, it wants the public to think there are no fish in the rivers, so the rivers are worthless. LIARS!
Elements of the People's Plan for Nature back up these idiotic claims. During his presentation to the 103-member People's Assembly, Exeter university confidence trickster boffin Ian Bateman argues against the traditional view that land is valuable because of the food that can be produced on it. He encourages people to buy woodland, calling it an "excellent investment for taxpayers" because of taxpayer-funded subsidies for ‘carbon capture’, rewilding or improving biodiversity. These are the “new values”, he insists, regurgitating an insane syllabus your kids are taught at school that is written by the RSPB. It’s mass indoctrination and if you’re a parent, you should be livid.
When the man-made climate change house of cards topples, along with unrealistic and economically-suicidal net zero policies, carbon capture subsidies will evaporate faster than the flawed science behind them. Once farmland is rewilded and irreversibly damaged, it’s worthless and those payments will disappear, like the livestock and crops it was home to. By that time, there will be no sign of Ian Bateman or his crap advice as he will be in hiding from those who listened to him.
Over in the Lake District, one of the few areas of the beautiful north spared ugly turbine farms, the National Trust is busy trying to reverse centuries of hard work that created the tourist spot. The mosaic of sheep-farmed hills made the region a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but the absurdly-woke crackpots who are running the NT into the ground want to end farming and everything that goes with it.
"How ironic," writes Neil Salisbury in The Countryman's Weekly, "that the organisations charged with protecting WHS status are actually the ones who are driving a coach and horses through it with their current policies."
In spasms of rewilding psychosis, the NT is ridding hills of sheep and kicking families off fells they farmed for generations. The "faceless bureaucrats" fail to acknowledge "the Lake District is what it is as a result of human activities", says Salisbury.
The future of the UK is a very ‘green’ and unpleasant land. This could be stopped, but the problem is few people are ready to speak out against fanatical ideas that kill livelihoods and create wastelands, even when they themselves are threatened.
The BBC doesn't help by broadcasting the slick RSPB, NT and WWF-funded Wild Isles propaganda videos that accompany the People's Plan for Nature. It has toed the wildlife charity line and broadcast man-made climate change disaster porn on a loop since 2018, when former head of news Fran Unsworth disabled all impartiality.
The rest of the lazy media aggravates this by churning out unsubstantiated doomsday predictions without checking the facts (see 1/5 for more details).
"The media may be in league with the RSPB," our angler reckoned. "Most of the BBC ‘watch’ programmes (Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch) come from RSPB reserves. The BBC will not touch the subject of cormorant predation. A few years ago a well-known photographer was due to appear on Springwatch. I asked him if he could mention the damage being done to freshwater fish stocks by [Chinese] cormorants and he told me that if he mentioned cormorants on the BBC, he would be committing ‘career suicide’."
The ‘watch’ series not many people watch these days regularly requires dozens of lorries to carry equipment to shoot in remote and picturesque locations, turning them into the opposite. It’s not surprising then to hear the story of a badger tagged by the Springwatch team getting run over by one of the trucks. According to The Telegraph, the BBC producers tried to cover it up.
Springwatch also tagged three salmon smolt. They called them Chris, Mikaela and Iollo after the show’s talented, brainy and attractive presenters. They said they would update viewers on their progress in the next Autumnwatch series, but didn't. There were rumours the fish were eaten by birds so didn't make it to the sea. Even if they had, they still needed to negotiate the army of seals and growing line of turbine farms encroaching Britain. Fish don’t go near turbines, which devastate sea life during construction and make large areas uninhabitable throughout their short lives.
Whales and dolphins have been beaching for decades due to sonar blips messing up their navigation systems. Now there’s a far more prevalent yet somehow acceptable threat of vibrations from miles of towers with massive rotating blades the length of football pitches. They are driving sea mammals to their death in droves.
ScottishPower funds RSPB Scotland’s Dolphinwatch. The company owns offshore turbine farms and must know the damage they do. The turbine makers also know the effect of their machines after years of research, yet they prefer to rake in free money from taxpayers than do anything about it.
My favourite ‘New Avenger’ Joanna Lumley is seething about this but didn’t reply to my email about an interview. Maybe it’s in my spam folder.
The RSPB, WWF and NT completely ignore the damage from turbines in their People’s Plan for Nature. Bone idle journalists in the northeast tried to blame the mass death of shellfish that washed up on Saltburn beach on trawlers or some new disease. None of them seemed to notice the turbine farm just a few hundred metres offshore.
In the third part of this series, I quizzed a climate journalist about why he thought the People’s Plan for Nature’s PR people were so secretive. He hit me with a conspiracy theory of his own about the Dogger Bank Wind Farm.
"I spent a lot of time knocking on the door of SSE Renewables… but got absolutely bloody nowhere,” he says. “I think they are a bit nervous about journalists asking things like why the hell are you manufacturing turbines in Thailand and shipping them around the world? What's the bloody carbon footprint of the Dogger Bank Wind Farm? Cuz I guarantee that it's fucking enormous.
"Thing is, what's the best way to hijack the green agenda and to set the timescale that suits your overriding economic interest? If you are a giant oil gas company… you take the lead on the construction of offshore wind farms and other infrastructure.
"Then you start to think is this so-called green revolution actually happening or is it simply being controlled for other reasons? And one simple fact to point you towards that, the total build cost for Dogger Bank Wind Farm is £9 billion. So… the cost of building the world's biggest wind farm is a drop in the ocean to the amount of money they continue to make out of oil and gas, right?"
A lot of conspiracy theories turn out to be true, but that sounds like bollocks. The so-called green revolution is nothing more than money-making schemes and expanding control. Nothing can replace big oil and it knows it. It doesn’t need to do anything.
Since the gamekeeper suggested RSPB’s vice-president Packham was in cahoots with the turbine pushers, he’s become the most high-profile supporter of the mindless Just Stop Oil movement. He’s even suggesting oil refineries could be targeted by eco-terrorists to “stop the flow“ and “things will turn violent“ to save the planet from a problem so microscopic it doesn’t really exist.
JSO's biggest donor is Packham's mate Dale Vince, the man behind the shady ‘sky diamonds’ business and founder of turbine energy provider Ecotricity, which earns him millions of pounds from taxpayers.
JSO isn’t happy about Vince’s earnings from ‘green’ subsidies. That might be embarrassing for Packham. Who cares? It seems the gamekeeper was right.
UPDATE 2023/10/07
Dale Vince announced yesterday he’s distancing himself from JSO, most likely because they’re out-of-control lunatics. Just look at the group’s hysterical spokeswoman on how everyone should be “devastated and terrified about climate collapse“. The fearmongering that causes breakdowns like this, is criminal.
These people need serious help. By that I mean deprogramming, not more people doing illegal things on the streets. They’ve been brainwashed by the climate-alarmism cult, which is just one step away from this:
JSO’s de facto leader Chris Packham, who has suggested it might be time for climate-alarmism protesters to start breaking the law, is now threatening to sue the PM for the “unlawful“ delays to livelihood-and-economy-killing net zero policies. No wonder Vince is making a sharp exit by turning away from eco-extremism and towards democracy. That means spending the millions he earned from subsidies (which came out of your pocket) to pay young people to vote Labour.
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