If you find yourself sitting in front of the telly at 8.10 tonight watching Harbour Lives on ITV1, I suggest you don't go and make yourself a cup of tea in the ad break. The world premiere of the new RSPB Giving Nature a Home advert will be screened.
Why are we doing this?
We and many others continue to fight many battles for wildlife but it is clear from State of Nature that we are not winning the war. Unless we deliver major societal change then we will oversee a slow but inevitable decline in the diversity and wonder of wildlife on our shores.
Part of our response must be to inspire more moral, practical and political support from all parts of society and that includes those armchair conservationists: people who have a passing interest in wildlife but do little about it.
Our advertising campaign is our attempt to excite and activate the enthusiasm for wildlife that is currently dormant in a large part of the population. Get this right and we'll have more people doing good things for wildlife in gardens and more people calling for more wildlife in their communities and more people intolerant of loss of the colour and diversity from our countryside and seas.
This is just the start of a new approach to wake up the public. I outlined our mini manifesto when we launched the campaign two weeks ago (see here). Recent announcements on CAP reform, public spending and the review of Natural England and the Environment Agency reinforces the urgent need for a new deal for wildlife.
So if you've had a busy week, get yourself a drink, sit down, put on the telly, watch a couple of ads and then go and get active this weekend.
I congratulate the RSPB for this initiative which is evidence of a first step to truly reaching out to the masses of people needed to make a real difference to protect the environment that sustains us all. It also appears to show the RSPB to be responsive to criticism. Very encouraging indeed.
The strategies needed to counter the thoughts of the proponents of the status quo such as Lord Lawson describing "Greens" as the new "Reds" in last Saturday's Telegraph needs to be carefully thought out and executed. I just hope other environmentally concerned organisations get their acts together and take a lead from the RSPB and start to present their compelling "reasoned" arguments for a balanced form of capitalism that the likes of Lord Lawson with his cynical and dangerous use of pejorative phraseology just don't seem to understand.
In his book "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool look at Climate Change" Lawson essentially suggests mankind adapt to an increasingly hostile environment while we pursue more of the same in economic system terms! Sounded like a vision of hell to me!!
Noting Peter Crispins views and having some sympathy with the need for a harder edge I say good luck to the RSPB and look forward to an evolution in this type of environmental awareness campaigning.
Just seen the advert on TV, it is great, just the job.
George Monbiot wants to wake up and realise for every one of what he calls rich who do not need the single farm payment there are several smaller farmers who need it and would think the salary he gets is excessive for the work and effort he puts in and would like to get the equivalent payment even though they work longer hours than him and harder work as well.
Lets have less criticism from him unless he is willing to take the same salary as small farmers get as income including the necessary part of their income coming from single farm payments.
The cheeky chap has a lifestyle and salary many of those he would deny part of their income would like to have.
Why no TV adverts in the run up to the CAP Summit on the grotesque injustices of the CAP budget ? Instead we have this saccharined pap. Can I refer you to this article and this example of the grotesque hypocrisy at the heart of the "countryside". The RSPB is most charitable would be the expression that I use; to the recipients of CAP largesse which is not its duty which lies with the conservation of wildlife.
There are dozens more examples like this in the Houses of Parliament
Robber Barons
July 1, 2013
73
Why do we ignore the most blatant transfer of money from the poor to the rich?
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 2nd July 2013.
It’s the silence that puzzles me. Last week, the Chancellor stood up in parliament to announce that benefits for the very poor would be cut yet again(1). On the same day, in Luxembourg, our government battled to maintain benefits for the very rich. It won. As a result, some of the richest people in Britain will each continue to receive millions of pounds in income support from taxpayers.
There has been not a whimper of protest. The Guardian hasn’t mentioned it. UK Uncut is silent. So – at the other end of the spectrum – is the UK Independence Party.
I’m talking about the most blatant transfer of money from the poor to the rich that has occurred in the era of universal suffrage. Farm subsidies. The main subsidy – the single farm payment – is doled out by the hectare. The more you own or rent, the more money you receive.
Since 1999, more progressive European nations have been trying to limit the amount of public money a farmer can capture under the Common Agricultural Policy(2). It looked as if, this year, they might at last succeed. But two governments in particular resisted, throughout the negotiations that ended last week: those resolute champions of the free market, Germany and the United Kingdom(3,4,5). Thanks to their lobbying, any decision has yet again been deferred(6).
There were two proposals for limiting handouts to the super-rich, known as capping and degressivity. Capping means that no one should receive more than a certain amount: the proposed limit was €300,000 a year(7). Degressivity means that, beyond a certain point, the rate received per hectare begins to fall. This was supposed to have kicked in at €150,000(8). The UK’s environment secretary, Owen Paterson, knocked both proposals down.
When our government says “we must help the farmers”, it means “we must help the 0.1%”. Most of the land here is owned by exceedingly wealthy people.
Some of them are millionaires from elsewhere: sheikhs, oligarchs and mining magnates who own vast estates in this country. Though they might pay no taxes in the UK, they receive millions in farm subsidies. They are the world’s most successful benefit tourists. Yet, amid the manufactured terror of immigrants living off British welfare payments, we scarcely hear a word raised against them.
The minister responsible for cutting income support for the poor, Iain Duncan Smith, lives on an estate owned by his wife’s family. Over the past ten years, it has received €1.5m in income support from taxpayers(9). How much more obvious do these double standards have to be before we begin to notice?
Thanks in large part to subsidies, the value of farmland in the UK has tripled in ten years(10): it has risen faster than almost any other speculative asset. Farmers are exempted from inheritance tax and capital gains tax. They can build, without planning permission, structures which lesser mortals would be forbidden to erect, boosting both their capital and income. And they have a guaranteed income from the state. Yet all we hear from their leaders is one long whinge(10).
I have yet to detect a word of gratitude from the National Farmers’ Union to the hard-pressed taxpayers who keep its members in such style. The NFU, dominated by the biggest landowners, has a peculiar genius for bringing out the violins. It pushes forward small, struggling hill farmers. The real beneficiaries of its policies are the arable barons hiding behind them.
An uncapped subsidy system damages the interests of small farmers. It reinforces the economies of scale enjoyed by the biggest landlords, helping them to drive the small producers out of business. A fair cap (say €30,000) would help small farmers compete with the big ones.
So here’s the question: why do we keep deferring to Big Farmer? Why do its sob stories go unchallenged? Why is this spectacular feudal boondoggle tolerated in the 21st Century?
Here are three possible explanations. A high proportion of the books aimed at very young children are about farm animals. There is usually one family of every kind of animal, and they live in harmony with each other and the rosy-cheeked farmer. Understandably, slaughter, butchery, castration, separation, crates and cages, pesticides and slurry never feature. The petting farms which have sprung up around Britain reify and reinforce this fantasy. Perhaps these books unintentionally implant, at the very onset of consciousness, a deep, unquestioned faith in the virtues of the farm economy(11).
Perhaps too, after being brutally evicted from the land through centuries of enclosure, we have learnt not to go there, even in our minds. To engage in this question feels like trespass, though we have handed over so much of our money that we could have bought all the land in Britain several times over. Perhaps we also suffer from a cultural cringe towards people who make their living from the land and the sea, seeing their lives – however rich and cossetted they are – as somehow authentic while ours feel artificial.
Whatever the reason may be, it’s time we overcame these inhibitions and confronted this unembarrassed robbery of the poor by the rich. The current structure of farm subsidies epitomises the British government’s defining project: capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich.
www.monbiot.com