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If the RSPB can’t call out government lies, democracy is under threat [1]
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Date: 2023-09
UK democracy has a serious problem. No one, not even an organisation with 1.2 million members, is allowed to call government ministers liars when they tell lies.
On Wednesday, the RSPB, the charity for bird lovers, tweeted its objection to the government’s U-turn on its promise not to weaken environmental laws, a move that will allow even more pollution to stream into England’s already shit-filled rivers.
“LIARS! @RishiSunak @michaelgove @theresecoffey you said you wouldn’t weaken environmental protections. And yet that’s just what you are doing. You lie, and you lie, and you lie again. And we’ve had enough.”
It was retweeted 20,000 times.
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But by the following morning, bosses at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had been forced into a humiliating backdown after pressure from a Conservative MP and much of the British media, and the threat of an investigation by the charity watchdog.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Beccy Speight, the charity’s chief executive, said she did not approve the post, and apologised for it. This was not, it’s worth noting, because she thought the government hadn’t lied.
The new policy, Speight said, “completely goes against the commitments that the government has made many times in the past, not to weaken environmental protections, most recently when the retained EU law bill was going through in the summer.
“This completely contravenes those commitments and that’s what’s led us to be so frustrated and so angry about the proposed amendment coming through.”
She said the charity was apologising because “the nature of public discourse does matter and that we have a role to play in that, and that we campaign on policy, not on people. So, the framing of that tweet, where we called out individual people, we felt was incorrect and inappropriate, and we apologise for that.”
The evening before Speight’s apology, Tory MP Mark Jenkinson had called on the Charity Commission to strip RSPB of its status. The Commission, astonishingly, responded by saying they were “assessing this matter”.
The tabloids also weighed in. Even after Speight’s apology, The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh accused the charity of becoming a “provisional wing of the Labour Party” and The Telegraph published an article headlined: “How the Left turned the RSPB from pro-conservation to anti-Conservative”.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/if-the-rspb-cant-call-out-government-lies-democracy-is-under-threat/
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