The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
The past week has been Parliament Week. Boris Johnson couldn’t possibly blow it up the way he blew up Anti-bullying Week last year, could he? Back then he undermined a massive government anti-bullying campaign for schools by refusing to fire Priti Patel as Home Secretary after she was found to have bullied her staff. What […]
From the editor: No doubt Babe will be covering the fallout from Anthony Mangnall’s vote on the Paterson corruption issue. We await with interest to hear what contortions Mangnall was obliged to perform both to justify his shameful stance and the subsequent U-turn. The noxious sewage fumes were as nothing compared with the stench of […]
So, today, only Simon Hoare, MP for North Dorset had the decency (amongst the Conservatives in our area) to vote against a measure that got a man found guilty of breaking lobbying rules off a 30 day commons’ ban. Ten of our region’s MPs did not vote for whatever reason. Let’s be kind and call […]
If the rain, the dark evenings and the (even darker) news are getting you down, you need an art fix – an encounter with creative energy and a feast of colour, art you can gaze at until you forget everything but the image in front of you. Distraction. Absorbtion. Escape. Well-known Lyme Regis artist Christine […]
Fellow readers have surely heard about the Immensa scandal by now, which has affected us here in the South West. Their Wolverhampton laboratory was sending false negative Covid test results to people on an alarming scale from September to October. There have been lots of graphs and analyses about this scandal in the press: but […]
The next two weeks are absolutely critical for the planet and West Country Voices will be featuring articles on the climate crisis, the conference and the parallel event being run in Totnes with our support. We will be watching closely to see if this government lives up to the green credentials it so frequently claims […]
Some background ahead of an important vote in parliament on 3 November: in September 2019, The Guardian published their scoop on MP Owen Paterson’s breaches of parliamentary rules by lobbying for companies that he was paid to advise. To quote: The documents [detailing meetings and letters] raise questions over whether the North Shropshire MP has broken parliamentary […]
COP26 is set to dominate the news over the next two weeks. Where does this leave our region and local communities? Totnes has started its own parallel environmental event to COP called ‘COPnes26’, continuing the town’s now well-established tradition of environmental and sustainability awareness. Here are some highlights: One of COPnes26’s roles is to enable community […]
Peat is an accumulation of slowly decaying plant matter formed in cool wet conditions. It is a remarkable substance and one of the most important stores of carbon on the planet. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), globally the remaining area of near-natural peatland (more than three million km²) contains more […]
[This letter is to Cornish MPs but many of the points made could be applied with equal force and justification to all Conservative MPs across our region and beyond. Ed] Dear George Eustice, Cherilyn Mackrory, Steve Double, Sheryll Murray, Derek Thomas and Scott Mann, At the last general election, all of you stood on a […]
Social media is increasingly being used by our MPs as a delivery tool for PR and puff messages, designed to imply that constituents’ concerns are being addressed. But, more often than not, what the feeds really reveal is the dark art of stage management and glaring contradictions at the heart of government policy, and a […]
Back in January David Warburton, Conservative MP for Somerton and Frome, was happy to announce support for a a private members bill to stop water companies discharging untreated sewage into rivers. He took the trouble to write to Sue Everett of the Friends of the River Frome (FoRF) after his meeting with her and colleague […]
George Eustice, Conservative MP for Camborne, Redruth & Hayle, and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The professional Cornishman stood for that famously green political party UKIP in the 1999 EU Parliament elections. He lost. He doesn’t promote his former affiliation on his website, of course, but if I were George Eustice […]
Hot on the heels of West Dorset MP Chris Loder’s scarily ill-informed and ill-advised comments on the parlous state of the UK’s supply chains comes this gem, which we are reproducing from the original blog post by Luke at Town Towels. It would be pure fun if it were not for the nasty undercurrent that […]
Fancy a bit of post-lockdown educational fun? Why not give a Science Festival a try? Think of Sidmouth and what springs to mind? The Regency architecture, perhaps? The wonderful rock formations and colourations of the Jurassic Coast? Or maybe the gorgeous, flamboyant, mad turmoil that is its famous annual folk festival? How about the Sidmouth […]
Helston Town Council and the Downsland Charity have failed to allay concerns over the sale of a wildlife corridor to developers. Last month, West Country Voices reported on a tangle of conflicting interests that has enmeshed Helston Town Council and a charitable trust that is meant to be acting in the interests of residents of […]
Robert Jenrick, the MP for Newark and former housing minister, lost his cabinet post under something of a cloud, after being caught failing to declare a secret meeting between himself and a clutch of property developers in the Enterprise Forum. He was clearly not entirely happy with his demotion, firing off a thinly veiled slingshot […]
Swapping scouse for pasties, misguidedly dissing Dartmoor and a stroll up the Cowsic. When I was 28 work took me from Merseyside to Cornwall: I traded a lively metropolis with easy access to the mountains of Wales and the north west, for the dramatic, breathtakingly-beautiful coastal scenery and pristine sandy beaches of the West Country. […]
Dear EiC Many thanks for Anthea Simmons’ pair of enlightening pieces on Yeovil MP Marcus Fysh. Having cast my line into the Register of Members Interests, I caught a couple of interesting minnows which supplement her arguments. The first article suggested Mr Fysh felt he had acquired some expertise in epidemiology and virology. Well he’s […]
MP for Yeovil Marcus Fysh is on fire at the moment. He’s become an expert epidemiologist and virologist in the space of a few days and now he is acting like a business development exec for private healthcare insurance companies. At first it seemed as though he and Newton Abbot MP Anne Marie Morris were […]
MP for Yeovil Marcus Fysh has miraculously become a medic – and an epidemiologist and virologist to boot. Perhaps he’s piloting a new government strategy aimed at filling the shortages in experienced staff across a whole range of sectors whereby an individual has only to express a nodding acquaintance with a subject or a function […]
Threats to democracy come in many guises. Sometimes they are dramatic, as set out clearly in Julian Andrews’ recent article in West Country Voices. Sometimes they come more quietly but are no less dangerous for being obscure. A series of articles this year has recorded the systematic sidelining of local democracy in Somerset. In March, […]
A tangle of conflicting interests raises questions over how developers have managed to push forward plans to build a new supermarket and a McDonald’s on a wildlife corridor on the outskirts of Helston in Cornwall. In 2019, Helston Town Council declared a climate emergency and announced that Helston was becoming an ‘Earth Protector Town’, a […]
The pandemic The ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language’ (TEFL) sector has for decades played a vibrant cultural and economic role across the UK, not just in the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) area. The spring and, especially, the summer seasons, used to see large numbers of foreign students arrive to study English, make new […]