Heads of Greenpeace have predicted that the administration of Rishi Sunak, UK’s prime minister will “go down in history” as the administration that failed the UK on the climate crisis while ministers pursued a dangerous culture war.
The charity’s joint executive directors were quoted as escribing government briefings against the organisation in the wake of its oil protest at the prime minister’s Yorkshire home as “really dark stuff”, which revealed a worrying trend towards exploiting environmental protests as a wedge issue.
In an interview, Areeba Hamid and Will McCallum said that an “unprecedented” move to block the organisation’s policy experts from advising civil servants could have disastrous consequences for environmental policy.
Last Thursday activists of Greenpeace- the world’s highest profile environmental NGO-draped Sunak’s Yorkshire manor house in black fabric to protest against his intention to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves with a new round of licences for intensive North Sea drilling.
The organisation said that it planned the protest carefully to coincide with the Sunak family’s trip to California when they knew the house would be empty. They have carried out such targeted environmental stunts before – at Sunak’s home and previously at David Cameron’s and John Prescott’s houses – but said this time the political response was more aggressive. Conservative MPs spoke about the peaceful stunt in the same breath as the murders of the MPs David Amess and Jo Cox.
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Hamid was quoted as saying that “retribution was swift” in the wake of the protest, with important meetings cancelled after ministers told government officials to cease all engagement with the group.
They said that a planned meeting about plastics with senior civil servants this week was pulled and the organisation was ejected from a WhatsApp group with civil servants planning a meeting with NGOs on ocean protection, a subject on which they have “decades” of policy expertise.
In his reaction, McCallum said: “Locking us out is really just denying civil servants a way of engaging with a civil society group that is desperately trying to make sure they are equipped to go into negotiations in the UN, for example, on deep-sea mining, or whatever the issue happens to be. So it is worrying.”
The organisation’s leaders have also published an open letter to Sunak, which was sent to him on Thursday. They told the prime minister that his “response to stonewall further communication sends a worrying signal about the government’s commitment to climate action, as well as the future of our democracy”.
Among other things, the letter accused Sunak’s government of adopting “more and more of a bunker mentality” in recent years and refusing to engage with civil society experts. They asked the PM to sit down with them and discuss “solutions for reducing the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels while tackling the cost of living crisis”.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
