https://peoplesplanfornature.org/. Be aware, threat or saviour for Britains farming community?
People’s Plan for Nature.
- Thread starter ajcc
- Start date
Threat. RSPB, WWF, NT. Say no more.
Swarfmonkey
Member
- Location
- Hampshire
Just the usual suspects (as named above) pushing their narrative. Can't say i'm surprised to see that the tax-dodging philanthropies the Esmee Fairburn Foundation and the European Climate Foundation are involved as "design and delivery partners".
Goweresque
Member
- Location
- North Wilts
Beware. Any organisation with 'Peoples' in its title is basically a front for hard Left politics, and can universally be assumed to be acting against best interests of the actual broad mass of the people of a country. See all the countries named 'People's republic of X'. Any such an organisation can be guaranteed not to be standing up for the rights of private landowners.
- Location
- Durham, UK
Ahh commie barstewards again
- Location
- Devon
The People’s Plan for Nature is powered by the WWF, the RSPB and National Trust. It is a unique collaboration with the UK public to protect and restore nature in the UK.
Tony Juniper one of lecturers? It’s happening before our very eyes, there is an agenda if you receive public money this is where the ‘public goods’ is going to come from.
Just be aware fellow farmers, it’s about control of land and rural livelihoods.
kfpben
Member
- Location
- Mid Hampshire
Is it?Beware. Any organisation with 'Peoples' in its title is basically a front for hard Left politics, and can universally be assumed to be acting against best interests of the actual broad mass of the people of a country. See all the countries named 'People's republic of X'. Any such an organisation can be guaranteed not to be standing up for the rights of private
The People’s Plan for Nature is a curious case study in green groups ‘guiding’ democracy for their own ends
CHARLES MOORE31 March 2023 • 9:00pm
The RSPB once believed their role was to protect nature via their bird reserves. They now have loftier ambitions CREDIT: Genevieve Vallee / Alamy
Listening to the news on BBC Radio 4 one morning last week, I heard the presenter say: “Citizens around the UK have come up with a people’s plan to restore nature.” The headline explained nothing – which citizens? how assembled? – but it sounded exciting.
I searched online and found the People’s Plan for Nature. The People, the website said, came out of a “National Conversation”. This produced a “People’s Assembly”, created “for the people, by the people of the UK”.
There were 103 individuals in the People’s Assembly – not elected by any actual people. Rather, they were a “representative group”, “randomly chosen” (though “proportionally lower” in the number of “white British” taking part) and drawn from respondents to 33,000 letters of invitation. The take-up of the invitation had been strikingly low. Less than 1 per cent accepted, yet each of the 103 was paid £800 for taking part, plus, where needed, expenses.
These few, these happy few, then listened at conferences to “a wide range of evidence and case studies over four weekends”, advised by 40 experts. Guided by “experienced facilitators”, who operated “a rapid democracy process”, they devised their People’s Plan for Nature.
The facilitators “themed and organised” the Plan’s 26 “Calls for Action”. These, asserts the website in Soviet tone, demonstrate “an irrefutable, independent case … for action, grounded in the will of the people”.
The Calls for Action include a “new regulatory body” which would achieve “greater government accountability through a permanent Assembly for Nature made up of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), industry and the public” and a “Union of influential organisations” to “establish a mandate for the proportionate inclusion of impact on nature in decision-making at all levels”, exerting control over all government and business decisions affecting nature. An eco-version of the Hippocratic oath would make government and businesses commit to “do no more harm to nature”.
Other Calls for Action include greater government intervention in land, such as “a network of local biodiverse and health-focused green spaces owned and run by the people, for the people” and “recognition of access to nature as a human right”.
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In themselves, these recommendations are unremarkable – exactly what you would expect when green pressure groups combine to accrue more power. Their demands are not mad, unlike some of those from Extinction Rebellion. Some even show a glimmer of reality, recognising that farms and businesses may suffer from green transitions. But the People’s Plan, like most ecological movements, never questions the virtue of ever-greater government, and appears hostile to private property and economic reality and doom-laden about climate change.
It is also gloopy about nature. Drawings accompanying its text show a young woman drinking coffee beside a sleepy red squirrel and a robin doffing his bowler hat at a walker. Nature must have “a seat at the table”, says the plan: an illustration shows several human beings sitting respectfully round a table at which a seated rabbit (or is it a hare? I am baffled by the draughtsmanship) holds forth to them.
Advertisement
Like most such documents, the People’s Plan is self-righteous, repetitive and intellectually lazy. But it is nevertheless fascinating in what it reveals about how such campaigns now operate. There are almost as many organisations involved as the nursery rhyme’s four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie and set before the king.
The dainty dish includes the Plan’s “delivery partners”, the Save Our Wild Isles Project, “a unique partnership between WWF, the RSPB and the National Trust, centred around a landmark natural history TV series being broadcast in early 2023”. The magic words “David Attenborough” are not mentioned, presumably because of problems about BBC impartiality rules if campaigners are seen to own the programme, but the Wild Isles series, currently showing, is his. The National Trust, its spokesman tells me, is also helping to pay for an iPlayer documentary “complementary” to the Attenborough series, about the people involved in making it. I imagine it will act as a recruiting sergeant for the organisations involved.
This is the first time these three charities have thus coordinated. They seem happy with the plan’s political position. “The UK is in the bottom 10 per cent of countries globally for protecting nature,” the three charity leaders assert in a joint statement. And they repeat the claim by the UN Environment Programme that “there are just seven years left to halt and reverse the loss of our natural world”. We can be certain that the changes they want will not take place in that time-frame, so if the UN claim were true, the WWF and the RSPB would have to close down in 2030, and the National Trust would have to fall back on its historic buildings, there being no natural world left to protect.
Advertisement
All three charities in effect endorse the Calls for Action. The People’s Assembly, you see, was “convened?? with their help and money. The amounts involved, the Trust tells me, are “financially sensitive information”. “THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN”, shouts the website of the WWF. That, says the RSPB’s website, is “too big to ignore”.
Which brings me to the campaign’s other elements. You will have heard of the WWF, the National Trust and the RSPB. You may subscribe to them. But have you heard of the Sortition Foundation, Involve, 89Up and the New Citizenship Project? Nor had I, but they are the ones whose conceptual and/or presentational brilliance have brought us this new definition of the People.
Advertisement
The Sortition Foundation is an international movement (“Transform politics. Upgrade democracy now!”). It believes that “stratified random selection”, not the dreary old ballot box, is the way to empower people. It picked the 103 “People” by “democratic lottery”. Involve is a “Public Participation charity”, chaired by a former special adviser in the last Labour government. It promotes the idea of Citizen’s Assemblies, backed by large sums from the Rowntree Trust, the European Climate Foundation and £230,000 from our own dear Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Involve ran the Assembly’s processes. As for 89Up, it is a media agency – “Europe’s first impact Agency”: “We help the good guys achieve great things.”
Finally, the New Citizenship Project (NCP) gingered up the National Conversation. It is a consultancy helping people “shape the things that matter to them” – eg, “articulating purpose with The Guardian”. In the opinion of Jon Alexander, the NCP co-founder, the National Trust, for which he worked, was its “birthplace”. The NCP’s philosophy is “purposeful participation”. Applied to the National Trust, this means that it is not enough for visitors to learn from and admire the objects they see and the places they visit. As the enthusiastic Trust man running Fountains Abbey puts it, his team is moving away from “imparting knowledge”: it is essential not to be “frightened by the preciousness of what we look after”.
Advertisement
The New Citizenship Project invented “rapid democracy” leading, in the People’s Plan, to “an output that has genuine public legitimacy”. If only, Mr Alexander muses, we had had that sort of democracy in 2015, imagine how different the Brexit referendum result the following year would have been.
But why is a group of 103 people so carefully selected, paid for and groomed by numerous organisations who all think the same thing, better than what happens when, in their millions, the people (with a small p) vote in local and general elections?
And how does an attempt to alter democracy because you are annoyed by its results relate to saving nature, or to the charitable purposes of great organisations such as the WWF, the RSPB and the National Trust?
CHARLES MOORE31 March 2023 • 9:00pm
The RSPB once believed their role was to protect nature via their bird reserves. They now have loftier ambitions CREDIT: Genevieve Vallee / Alamy
Listening to the news on BBC Radio 4 one morning last week, I heard the presenter say: “Citizens around the UK have come up with a people’s plan to restore nature.” The headline explained nothing – which citizens? how assembled? – but it sounded exciting.
I searched online and found the People’s Plan for Nature. The People, the website said, came out of a “National Conversation”. This produced a “People’s Assembly”, created “for the people, by the people of the UK”.
There were 103 individuals in the People’s Assembly – not elected by any actual people. Rather, they were a “representative group”, “randomly chosen” (though “proportionally lower” in the number of “white British” taking part) and drawn from respondents to 33,000 letters of invitation. The take-up of the invitation had been strikingly low. Less than 1 per cent accepted, yet each of the 103 was paid £800 for taking part, plus, where needed, expenses.
These few, these happy few, then listened at conferences to “a wide range of evidence and case studies over four weekends”, advised by 40 experts. Guided by “experienced facilitators”, who operated “a rapid democracy process”, they devised their People’s Plan for Nature.
The facilitators “themed and organised” the Plan’s 26 “Calls for Action”. These, asserts the website in Soviet tone, demonstrate “an irrefutable, independent case … for action, grounded in the will of the people”.
The Calls for Action include a “new regulatory body” which would achieve “greater government accountability through a permanent Assembly for Nature made up of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), industry and the public” and a “Union of influential organisations” to “establish a mandate for the proportionate inclusion of impact on nature in decision-making at all levels”, exerting control over all government and business decisions affecting nature. An eco-version of the Hippocratic oath would make government and businesses commit to “do no more harm to nature”.
Other Calls for Action include greater government intervention in land, such as “a network of local biodiverse and health-focused green spaces owned and run by the people, for the people” and “recognition of access to nature as a human right”.
Advertisement
In themselves, these recommendations are unremarkable – exactly what you would expect when green pressure groups combine to accrue more power. Their demands are not mad, unlike some of those from Extinction Rebellion. Some even show a glimmer of reality, recognising that farms and businesses may suffer from green transitions. But the People’s Plan, like most ecological movements, never questions the virtue of ever-greater government, and appears hostile to private property and economic reality and doom-laden about climate change.
It is also gloopy about nature. Drawings accompanying its text show a young woman drinking coffee beside a sleepy red squirrel and a robin doffing his bowler hat at a walker. Nature must have “a seat at the table”, says the plan: an illustration shows several human beings sitting respectfully round a table at which a seated rabbit (or is it a hare? I am baffled by the draughtsmanship) holds forth to them.
Advertisement
Like most such documents, the People’s Plan is self-righteous, repetitive and intellectually lazy. But it is nevertheless fascinating in what it reveals about how such campaigns now operate. There are almost as many organisations involved as the nursery rhyme’s four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie and set before the king.
The dainty dish includes the Plan’s “delivery partners”, the Save Our Wild Isles Project, “a unique partnership between WWF, the RSPB and the National Trust, centred around a landmark natural history TV series being broadcast in early 2023”. The magic words “David Attenborough” are not mentioned, presumably because of problems about BBC impartiality rules if campaigners are seen to own the programme, but the Wild Isles series, currently showing, is his. The National Trust, its spokesman tells me, is also helping to pay for an iPlayer documentary “complementary” to the Attenborough series, about the people involved in making it. I imagine it will act as a recruiting sergeant for the organisations involved.
This is the first time these three charities have thus coordinated. They seem happy with the plan’s political position. “The UK is in the bottom 10 per cent of countries globally for protecting nature,” the three charity leaders assert in a joint statement. And they repeat the claim by the UN Environment Programme that “there are just seven years left to halt and reverse the loss of our natural world”. We can be certain that the changes they want will not take place in that time-frame, so if the UN claim were true, the WWF and the RSPB would have to close down in 2030, and the National Trust would have to fall back on its historic buildings, there being no natural world left to protect.
Advertisement
All three charities in effect endorse the Calls for Action. The People’s Assembly, you see, was “convened?? with their help and money. The amounts involved, the Trust tells me, are “financially sensitive information”. “THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN”, shouts the website of the WWF. That, says the RSPB’s website, is “too big to ignore”.
Which brings me to the campaign’s other elements. You will have heard of the WWF, the National Trust and the RSPB. You may subscribe to them. But have you heard of the Sortition Foundation, Involve, 89Up and the New Citizenship Project? Nor had I, but they are the ones whose conceptual and/or presentational brilliance have brought us this new definition of the People.
Advertisement
The Sortition Foundation is an international movement (“Transform politics. Upgrade democracy now!”). It believes that “stratified random selection”, not the dreary old ballot box, is the way to empower people. It picked the 103 “People” by “democratic lottery”. Involve is a “Public Participation charity”, chaired by a former special adviser in the last Labour government. It promotes the idea of Citizen’s Assemblies, backed by large sums from the Rowntree Trust, the European Climate Foundation and £230,000 from our own dear Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Involve ran the Assembly’s processes. As for 89Up, it is a media agency – “Europe’s first impact Agency”: “We help the good guys achieve great things.”
Finally, the New Citizenship Project (NCP) gingered up the National Conversation. It is a consultancy helping people “shape the things that matter to them” – eg, “articulating purpose with The Guardian”. In the opinion of Jon Alexander, the NCP co-founder, the National Trust, for which he worked, was its “birthplace”. The NCP’s philosophy is “purposeful participation”. Applied to the National Trust, this means that it is not enough for visitors to learn from and admire the objects they see and the places they visit. As the enthusiastic Trust man running Fountains Abbey puts it, his team is moving away from “imparting knowledge”: it is essential not to be “frightened by the preciousness of what we look after”.
Advertisement
The New Citizenship Project invented “rapid democracy” leading, in the People’s Plan, to “an output that has genuine public legitimacy”. If only, Mr Alexander muses, we had had that sort of democracy in 2015, imagine how different the Brexit referendum result the following year would have been.
But why is a group of 103 people so carefully selected, paid for and groomed by numerous organisations who all think the same thing, better than what happens when, in their millions, the people (with a small p) vote in local and general elections?
And how does an attempt to alter democracy because you are annoyed by its results relate to saving nature, or to the charitable purposes of great organisations such as the WWF, the RSPB and the National Trust?
Y Fan Wen
Member
- Location
- N W Snowdonia
You left out, People's 'Democratic' Republic of...