 Tell George to wake up! Dear Supporter As well as telling us how much more we'll have to pay for a pint of beer or a litre of petrol, the UK Budget provides a test of the Government's commitment to the environment. Last November, the Chancellor described hard-won legal protections for our most precious wildlife sites as a 'ridiculous cost on British business'. Smart growth Watch our Wake Up George animation to see what things could be like if he takes a different view later this month. The current economic crisis means the Chancellor needs to deliver economic growth and create jobs. But we don't believe that the environment is a barrier to success. It is crucial to our well-being and our economic performance. We want smart growth that does no environmental harm. Help George do the right thing Please step up for nature and e-mail George Osborne today - it only takes a couple of minutes. Urge him to use his Budget statement on 21 March to put the environment at the heart of the UK's economic recovery. Thank you for your support. Martin Harper PS We'll be in touch again at the end of the month to let you know what effect our efforts had on the budget. Let's hope the Chancellor listens and decides to step up for nature too!
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There's a hidden side to this one, you know. Back under the previous administration, the Government stumbled upon a very useful public policy tool which later came to be known as the Fake Charity. What they did was started to provide grants to a pre-existing charity (Action on Smoking and Health [ASH] being a very good example thereof) and continued until the charity was thoroughly reliant upon, and indeed addicted to this source of easy money. Then the Government began to place conditions on the continued funding, such as campaigning on behalf of the Government.
For ASH, the funding turned it into an increasingly-discredited barker for whatever mad-cap anti-smoking ban the Department of Health was trying to dream up this week. Similar things happened to other charities; hitherto fairly sensible road safety pressure groups got mutated into hysterical Government mouthpieces, and so on.
The RSPB never got influenced to anywhere near the extent of other charities by an influx of Government funding, but it did receive large grants to talk up man-made climate change on behalf of Government, albeit somewhat reluctantly (wildlife actually copes quite well with Earth's madcap climate, as the records of the last few Ice Ages and interglacials adequately demonstrates). Unfortunately for the RSPB and quite a few other charities, being paid as a Government barker was one of the things that got cut fairly recently, so this current campaign may be seen more as belated revenge rather than actual campaigning.
Finally, what the Chancellor is trying rather feebly to do is to roll back some of the vast amount of red tape currently smothering UK industry. Britain is an industrial nation; it is too populous to subsist on agriculture alone and desperately needs to re-industrialise before it collapses economically; hence this red-tape cutting exercise. Even trying to go things on agriculture alone would likely horrify the RSPB; to provide the funding needed to keep Britain running would mean full-on industrial farming to the exclusion of all else...
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