With COP just weeks away, the Prime Minister has been urging countries to announce meaningful cuts to emissions.
But his speech hides something entirely different. His Government are failing to make progress on cutting emissions and are instead going backwards.
1. Tree planting humiliation
In the 2019 election the Conservatives promised to plant 30,000 hectares of trees a year by 2024. But rather than increasing they're actually going backwards.
Wiltshire Council and Natural England have created the Wiltshire Environmental Toolkit, (WET) which gives community groups, and town and parish councils, helpful advice to create and improve habitats and the natural environment in their area.
The toolkit is packed with information, ideas and resources to enable communities to create habitats rich in biodiversity. This in turn will create leisure opportunities and encourage visitors to the area, as well as help to fight climate change.
Today's i newspaper features Sir Ed Davey's call for the government to bring in a beefed up version of Plan B as a matter of urgency to avoid a winter lockdown. Daisy Cooper also criticises the new Minister for Vaccines and Public Health for keeping a low profile. In the Commons yesterday, Layla Moran challenged the government on whether it is operating a policy of herd immunity.
On 12th October 2021 Liberal Democrats for Electoral Reform held a panel event about why equal votes and diversity go hand-in-hand. The online event featured Cllr Hina Bokhari AM and Lord Paul Tyler (bios below). It included a discussion on key questions like "will equal votes be likely to improve the diversity of representation in Parliament?", "what can we do as equal votes campaigners to reach out to new, diverse communities?" and "where next for the campaign?".
Conservative Party Chairman Oliver Dowden has admitted only 20 fuel tanker drivers from overseas were now working on UK roads with the government having recently U-turned on issuing 5000 short-term visas to foreign drivers to help get us through a risk of missed deliveries leading up to Christmas.
BOTH Westbury and Frome could benefit from a new eco-friendlier bus service thanks to a proposal discussed by the Vision for Westbury (VFW) committee late last month.
The new Mellor Orion E-Bus would run on electricity and is the first of its kind to be specifically designed for the kinds of roads found on routes in Westbury and rural inter-urban routes such as Westbury-Frome.
Here's an example of how central government micro-manages local councils. To get money to fix traffic lights WC has to compete with other councils and draw up a bid and submit it to the government under a special time-limited traffic-light-fixing funding scheme. Read the WC announcement:
Wiltshire Tories want you to know that if your town has a population of over 10,000, then they will put at least one electric vehicle charging point in your car-park.
We don't want to be churlish, but the council really needs to:
Increase the number of charge points to something more realistic, one or two charge points for a town of 10,000 people really isn't enough!
The Federal Conference Committee recently met to discuss the Conference format for 2022.
We considered a number of options for next year's conferences and took the difficult decision to hold Spring Conference as an online conference and only returning to an in-person event for Autumn Conference. The dates of Spring Conference will be 11-13 March 2022 and we will announce the dates and venue for Autumn Conference in due course.
