Ionathan and I, two BCN Wildlife Trust Young Peoples Forum members met up with Daniel Zeichner to discuss our concerns surrounding the environment, particularly the government’s expansion of fossil fuels, subsidies for green recovery and pesticides. I was overall pleased with his answers, and he gave us a good insight into environmental politics and law.
Image: Young People's Forum members Callum (left) and Ionathan (right) meeting MP Daniel Zeichner (centre).
Early in 2023, the BCN Wildlife Trust Young Peoples Forum started talking about the idea of meeting MPs to engage them with concerns about the environment. As a political husting is more appropriate close to an election, it was decided that individual young people would meet with MPs in their local area. As a result, Ionathan and I started to try and organise a meeting with Daniel Zeichner, MP for Cambridge. In June 2023, we met and worked out roughly what content the email should have and drafted the email.
Finally, in September 2023, I sent the email to Daniel. He agreed to have the meeting, and by the end of September, the date of Friday 19th of January 2024 was finalised and put in his diary.
It was decided that this meeting should not be on behalf of the BCN Wildlife Trust because the trust has to maintain impartiality, so this would mean that the meeting would have to have been led by a staff member, rather than young people’s forum members.
One working week before the meeting, we wrote the agenda which had a focus on the recent expansions of North Sea oil and gas, river pollution and what labour would do about the various environmental crises if they had a working majority. We then emailed it to Daniel so he could come more well prepared and give us better answers. If I was doing this again, I would have sent the agenda a week earlier, as MPs clearly are busy, and it would have given him a better chance to conduct research into the topics we wanted to ask him about.
In the meeting, we discussed environmental concerns overall, such as river pollution, the climate crisis and subsidies for nature recovery.
At the beginning, we made it clear that we were interested in his plans to tackle issues we raised, and not the failures of the government as we wanted a discussion about plans for the future and not the failures of the past and present. With that out of the way, we asked him about the current offshore petroleum licensing bill which is going through parliament- a bill which would significantly expand North Sea oil production and would water down climate targets. Daniel said he would vote against it, but that the government has a majority, and can get what they like through unless their own party rebels. Daniel did vote against the bill on the vote on the second reading.
We also asked him about tackling sewage pollution. He said Labour would ‘toughen up sentences’ for polluters and have ‘prison as a last resort’. He said Labour would properly enforce water pollution regulations to stop water companies discharging sewage into the rivers. Some of you may be wondering about renationalisation, which he said was too expensive in the short term, but could be a long-term goal.
On the topic of neonicotinoids, a group of pesticides that are very harmful to bees, Daniel said Labour would pass legislation which would ban them. These pesticides were banned by the EU and legalised in 2022 in the UK after Brexit.
Lastly, Daniel talked about farmer’s subsidies for nature recovery, which he said he had personally worked on as shadow agriculture minister. He said that he wanted a method for measuring how successful they are as currently there is not one. This would help decide where money can be spent with the greatest impact- particularly important with a lack of money.
Overall, the meeting was a success, with an interesting insight into environmental politics. Daniel was rightfully careful to not make promises he cannot keep to and explained the difficulties governments face when tackling the environmental multi-crisis.
Young People's Forum members and members of staff. Credit: Laura Allen.
