• Sand, Sea and Sewage: Are English Bathing Waters Safe?

    Sand, Sea and Sewage: Are English Bathing Waters Safe?

    Please click here for a short Interview film ( 8 minutes ) with Marinet's Directors.

  • SAND, SEA & SEWAGE

    SAND, SEA & SEWAGE

    Click here to read
    Marinet report, titled Sand, Sea and Sewage with an Obituary Tribute to Pat Gowen (1932-2017).

  • Twitter

David Levy – Can the environmental movement be ‘a beacon of light’ and solve challenging problems? – Jun 24

The Government of this country, whatever its persuasion, has a lot to be accountable for.   They have neutered the NGO movement by appealing to their greed for charitable money, and they have a total mistrust of the voluntary sector.

Nowadays NGOs are, all too often, run by salaried hippy bureaucrats who regularly switch jobs within the NGO fraternity.   If you have lost contact with anyone, just look sideways and that’s where you will find them.

This regular switching is problematic and raises a question:   Is it recycling and a genuine transfer of talent, or could they be ‘place people’ acting for those who do not want change?

What do I mean?   Well place people block progress, and by this I mean solutions to environmental problems.   Their role is to be part of the blame culture which is endemic in society.   The blame culture rarely proposes the solutions.

For example, they raise legal challenges against Government agencies which, if successful, simply draw attention to the problem, but do not provide either the solution or the means to achieve it.

The Office of Environmental Protection (OEP) was the Government’s response in the Environment Act 2021 to enable people to challenge Government and its agencies when they are were not operating in line with the law.   The Act intended the OEP to be a champion of the people.   The reality however is that the OEP has proved to be just another layer of bureaucracy, and the public are further stymied and removed from being able to achieve change.

Government has closed all pathways for remedies whilst, at the same time, conning the electorate with promises of consultation and a so-called democratic Parliament.

At one time the House of Lords provided the checks and balance to the rampant House of Commons, and the Lords worked hard, filtering legislation to take into consideration their Lordship’s experience and perspective.   What happens now is that whatever the House of Commons wants, it gets.   Look at the Rwanda fiasco if you wish to understand my point of view.

The trouble is, the next Government will behave in exactly the same way.   The result is that no Bill, however ludicrous, gets proper scrutiny or is modified to adapt it to reason.   This opens the door to arguments for reform of the House of Lords to ensure that it genuinely performs a revisionary role.

Anyone who has witnessed the Government’s deliberate policy to provide food for the masses at bargain prices, must also acknowledge that the policy has created a problem for the environment by NOT connecting-up the industry to solutions for the waste that industry produces.

The move towards getting us all to drive electric cars, for example, was ill conceived on two major fronts.   Firstly, the failure to roll out charging points around the country. Secondly, what will we do with the mountain of scrap batteries once used?   I could go on, but there are so many examples like this one, that I’ll let you want fill in the blanks for yourself.

‘Abide with me’, that is my clarion call for those who believe in principles.   Our world is so complex, even the most reasonable of people now settle for the pragmatic.

I understand this, however this approach is tainted and will not act as a ‘beacon of light’ for those seeking solace.

David Levy