5 ≠ 10
George Monbiot is a great speaker of truth. His book Feral: rewilding the land, sea and human life, Penguin, 2014 in particular is simply superb. Focussing only on the discussion of the scandals besetting Rachel Reeves it was almost comical to witness the pathetic nature of the Labour spokesperson’s defence. The questioner had asked how we could trust her on anything, the response only that the ‘errors’ on her CV were just that and not deliberate lies. George Monbiot agreed that it was definitely not ok but that it was a trivial distraction from the bigger issues. I cannot agree. I do think that the right-wing media fuss about a pretty minor matter relating to Angela Rayner’s tax returns and Rachel Reeves’ alleged claiming for a bottle of champagne which was never delivered to its intended recipient are small beer in the scheme of things (although I had no idea that it was possible to set an alcoholic gift for a colleague against tax), but the CV business is to my mind of a different order. Reeves has been quick to blame an underling but surely she should have checked the important summary of her past career and it very definitely should not have had to be corrected twice. To summarise, she was in customer relations, not an economist as claimed at HBOS, neither did she work at the Bank of England for a decade (it was about half that). According to a leading article in The Times, the latter was “a frequently repeated claim that formed a key part of her message to reassure voters … These lapses suggest that the chancellor was either a careless administrator of her online profile or, as her critics suggest, that she has sought to embellish her credentials for political [gain].” Peter Kyle, the science secretary, has even tried to divert blame to the BBC for over-reporting the issue. Her current office is the second most senior in government and one in which trustworthiness and probity should be absolute pre-requisites, beyond reproach. We have long since learned not to trust politicians but their standards and behaviour should at least set some sort of example to the rest of us – or they should even just pretend to aspire to that (members of our present and last governments simply stopped bothering with such “detail”). Which is why John Prescott punching the egg-throwing voter was never ok (“Just John being John”, said Blair at the time).
George Monbiot is right of course when he talks about what all this is a distraction from – a catastrophic situation and a government with no vision other than ‘growth’, by which they mean GDP growth, which should not be the only measure of national welfare. From this government, he continued, we have a sustained attack on regulation and regulators, all that there is to defend us from predatory capitalism. Using GDP as the sole measure of our well-being is a gross deception.
UPDATE. RR is not the only one. It has now emerged that Jonathan Reynolds, Business Secretary, seems also to have lied on his LinkedIn profile. Similarly he blames human error and not having written the entry himself. He is described as both a trainee and a fully qualified solicitor and in 2014 claimed in the Commons that he had “worked as a solicitor in Manchester city centre”. At one point this was repeated on his constituency website. So, what’s the problem? The problem is that he wasn’t and therefore cannot have done. He never finished his training.
Drax
I first wrote about Drax towards the end of last year:
In other news, a firm called Drax (which already sounds rather sinister) has agreed to help produce ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel from wooden biomass pellets. It already generates 7% of the UK’s power, allegedly from sawdust, other residue and branches, claiming that the carbon emissions from the burning is offset by new trees being planted. Some, like Greenpeace, are unconvinced. It does sound rather like the claims made by the disastrous HS2 project, where they either didn’t understand or pretended not to understand that felling ancient woods and planting saplings nearby (and failing to look after them) did not create a happy equilibrium.
It seems my suspicions were well-grounded. Another article in The Times is headlined “Is Drax power plant a green ‘scam’?” Certainly Ed Mathew, associate director of E3G, the climate change think tank, has said so: “Drax is a complete scam when it comes to emission cuts.” Burning trees instead of coal gets a big tick in the government box in terms of meeting renewable energy targets, but the carbon accounting is fundamentally flawed. The wood is shipped here from Canada and the Southern United States for a start, and in spite of claims to the contrary, Drax has been caught out sourcing wood from forests in areas of high biodiversity and damaging high-carbon forests and soils. Last year Drax was find £25m by Ofgem for inaccurate reporting in 2021-2022 and the BBC claims this also happened in the previous financial year. It won’t bother them much though. Biomass fuel is more expensive than coal and so government subsidies, a.k.a. taxpayers’ money, has been used to subsidise them since 2013 to the tune of £6.5bn. Yes, billion. Sir Ed Davey has accused Drax of “gaming the system” to maximise profit. A new deal has halved the projected subsidy for the coming year, but it will still run to about £470m. Profits are forecast at between £100m and £200m and were £670m in 2023. Net-zero demands are already being undermined, whilst Nigel Farage is against the notion altogether.
Badgers
Nature notes in the same edition of The Times (15th February) are written by John Lewis-Stempel whose book, The Sheep’s Tale; the story of our most misunderstood farmyard animal Doubleday, 2022 and Penguin Books, 2023, I very much enjoyed and wrote about in Animal Wild, but here, bizarrely, he describes coming across a badger latrine in France: “This can’t be mistaken for anything else, being a squarish hole about a foot in length and heaped with black droppings.” Of course there are many variations but every single latrine I have come across (and with our badger sett surveying group I have seen a large number) is roundish hole, and never anywhere near a foot long. There may be a more or less rectangular line of latrines (denoting a territorial boundary) but that is not the same thing and would extend much further than a foot. The colour of the droppings unsurprisingly depends on what the badgers have been eating. Unless French badgers do things very differently for reasons best known to themselves.
Protect the Wild has brought Jeremy Clarkson’s remarks about badgers in his farming programme in 2023 back to the surface: he suggested that they should be shot, gassed, run over, or even “hit over the head with a hammer” along with spewing out the usual lies about badgers and bTB. An advisor said that they don’t need protecting anyway, since that was only brought in the 1980s in an effort to prevent badger-baiting which “is not a problem any more.” I can assure him that it very much is. Adult badgers form a very strong sagittal crest or ridge which would make killing them with a hammer, if you were so twisted and sick an individual as to want to do so, extremely difficult. Ignorance or deliberate lies? A heady mixture I think. Protect the Wild have also recently pointed out that the shooting industry’s promised voluntary phasing out of lead ammunition has pretty much completely failed. No surprises there then. 93% of carcasses tested from the 2023-2024 shooting season contained lead and the figures for grouse were appalling too. Levels were “substantially higher than is permitted in meat from farmed animals and poultry”. Legislation hasn’t worked either. Using lead shot to kill waterbirds has been prohibited for decades, but 69% of murdered Mallard tested from 2021-2022 seasons contained lead shot. And of course it doesn’t just affect the direct victims – other wildlife and humans who eat the birds are damaged too, the poison compromising immune systems and reproductive success.
By way of light relief (sort of), a post in an online neighbourhood group reports the sighting of a apparently distressed badger on a pavement. A comment follows: “They look sweet I know, but can be viscious [sic] if you get near to help them.” I am not sneering at the misspelling, but vicious is not the right word – strong, fierce, dangerous, defensive, all of those things, but not vicious. Only humans derive pleasure from inflicting pain. Nor are they responsible for our hedgehog population decline as Clarkson also claimed as did, very disappointingly, a member of staff at the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. That is down to many factors with pesticide use probably the greatest, but badgers only occasionally eat hedgehogs in extremis. Similar claims were made by a hedgehog specialist on Vinnie Jones’ farming programme, but a more informed and enlightened expert later put him straight later in the series.
On the subject of pesticides, online BirdGuides has the headline “Pesticides a major contributor to global biodiversity crisis, says study”. As one commentator points out, we already know this. There are plenty of alternatives and animals will likely become immune to the pesticides in due course anyway – but the damage has already been done.
Three new animals
Or, rather, ones I had never heard of, all in one week of daily crossword solving. The Potoroo was the first, a small Australian marsupial, of which there are three kinds: Long-nosed, Long-footed and Gilbert’s. They form the only genus in the Potorous group. All are under threat and a fourth species has long been extinct post-colonisation. This image was created by Sarah Stone for John White’s Journal of a voyage to New South Wales : with sixty-five plates of nondescript animals, birds, lizards, serpents, curious cones of trees and other natural productions, for J. Debrett, 1790.
Then the Pyjama Shark. Why on earth was it called that I wondered – until I found images of their stripey exterior. They are about three and a half feet long and live off the coast of South Africa. They are commonly victims of bycatch and are taken for aquaria, but the population is apparently holding steady.
Thirdly the Elater, a.k.a. Click Beetle – their strong clicks propel them into the air to avoid predators or to right themselves. There are around 9,300 species. The larvae, known as wireworms are treated as agricultural pests but they have a remarkable ability to recover from illness caused by insecticides.
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