CHARLOTTE GILL
On Monday, Paul Homewood, my fellow columnist for the Daily Sceptic, excellently laid out the problems with the Climate and Nature Bill (CAN), a Private Members’ Bill currently making its way through Parliament. This Bill, as Homewood notes, “threatens to wreck the U.K. economy, damage lives and undermine democracy” by calling for U.K. emissions to be slashed “in line with the 1.5°C target” – effectively cutting emissions by about 90% in the next 10 years. Alarmingly, 192 MPs have already expressed support for it.
I have been monitoring this Bill for some time, albeit from a somewhat different angle. Most of my articles focus not on the details of bills, as Homewood’s article so helpfully delves into, but the personalities behind them. In both cases we show how shoddy this Bill is, as can be partly gleaned from those endorsing it.
Just like the campaigns for the Four Day Week, and the Assisted Dying Bill, the CAN Bill may feel a bit random to members of the electorate. This is a classic sign of a Bill that has had lots of Left-wing lobbying behind it, and sometimes funding. It means there’s been a flurry of activity in Lefty circles, out of sight from Joe Bloggs, who may find himself saying “who, where, what?” when it’s proposed in Parliament.
I first heard of CAN through an activist group titled “Zero Hour”, whose raison d’être appears to be pushing the Bill:
It has famous supporters including Chris Packham:
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall:
Zac Goldsmith:
And Labour’s major donor Dale Vince, whose organisation Ecotricity “powered” Zero Hour’s stall at the Labour Party Conference this year. NB: I do not know exactly what “powered” means here.
Alongside Vince, the Zero Hour panel included Labour MPs, the Labour Mayor for West Yorkshire Tracey Brabin and Chris Skidmore, the former Conservative Energy Minister.
Skidmore was responsible for signing Net Zero into law under Theresa May, albeit he didn’t stay on as an MP long to see the agenda through, resigning in January in protest at the Conservative Government’s new oil and gas licences, before going off to work with Al Gore.
At the Labour Party Conference, he quipped that it was a “change of scene” to what he was used to:
But he’s hardly a stranger to the Green Lobby:
The CAN Bill was chosen as a private member’s bill by Dr. Roz Savage, a Liberal Democrat MP who holds four Guinness World Records for ocean rowing.
She is also a “United Nations Climate Hero” and lobbies for Greenpeace “to tackle the climate and nature emergency”:
Greenpeace comes up a lot when I am researching the Green Blob. This might not sound particularly surprising – it’s a green organisation, after all. It’s just, it isn’t always explicit when its employees are involved in eco activities. As I wrote last time for the Daily Sceptic, Led by Donkeys includes Greenpeace employees, past and present, a fact first revealed by Guido Fawkes.
Ben Stewart (his LinkedIn below) and Will Rose, two members of Led by Donkeys, worked for Greenpeace as far back as 2007.
That year they and four other Greenpeace protestors scaled the Kingsnorth power station in Kent, becoming known as “The Kingsnorth Six”:
The year after they were acquitted on the “groundbreaking defence that argued that it was necessary for the protesters to disrupt the coal-powered plant’s operations to reduce the greater damage it was doing to the environment” (from Led by Donkeys’ interview with the New Statesman, October 2024).
Extraordinarily it was then-barrister Keir Starmer who helped the Kingsnorth Six put together their case, having already represented Greenpeace members sued for libel by McDonald’s in 1997.
In the same interview Ben Stewart said that Starmer was “famously great if you were an activist… and to have him was just thrilling”.
Another interesting fact about this case is that Zac Goldsmith – now a Lord and formerly the Conservative Minister for Overseas Territories, Commonwealth, Energy, Climate and Environment at the Foreign Office – was witness for the defence:
That means he defended Greenpeace, whose argument was essentially that “the ends justify the means” – the means being direct action. Over a decade since, he hasn’t exactly flagged the identities of Led by Donkeys (which he must have known for some time, and was left to Guido Fawkes to unveil).
To reiterate, Goldsmith now thinks we need the CAN Bill:
And is also somehow a “Conservative”. Is he one in the way Chris Skidmore apparently is?
Either way, the CAN Bill has the support of a man who once defended Greenpeace, including two of Led by Donkeys. Is his advocacy, as well as that of Packham et al., much of an endorsement?
PS: I am aware this is a rather un-Christmassy article, but I do wish everyone a fantastic day – and my next article will be about some hopes for the New Year as regards Woke Waste and DOGE U.K.
Charlotte Gill regularly publishes about the use of taxpayers’ money to fund Left-wing causes and Left-wing researchers in Woke Waste, her Substack. You can subscribe here.
This article (The Lobbyists Behind the Climate and Nature Bill) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Charlotte Gill
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