Keir Starmer has been accused of “pathetic bullying” by a Norfolk environmental campaigner who was singled out and ridiculed by the prime minister in an article within the Day by day Mail.
Sir Keir heaped scorn on Andrew Boswell throughout the primary 5 paragraphs of an article within the tabloid, headlined “We’ll stop the time-wasting NIMBYs and zealots from holding the country to ransom”.
Dr Boswell, a pc scientist, now manufacturers himself an environmental marketing consultant and challenges street and different tasks within the courts which he argues break atmosphere, nature and habitat legal guidelines.
“I think it’s a very dangerous thing for the prime minister to do, and he shouldn’t have approached it this way.”
Requested why he thought it was harmful, Dr Boswell replied: “Well, he has named me. I’m just an ordinary person, a member of the public. I go about my life on that basis. I don’t have a vast media team to protect me. I don’t have other protections. It’s a very dangerous thing to do to an individual.”
Dr Boswell mentioned, following the assault, that Keir Starmer ought to perceive the federal government is failing to uphold its local weather ambitions and that he desires to debate this with the PM.
“Keir Starmer ought to actually meet me, and I’d like to talk to him about the climate emergency and the fact that you can’t just dismiss carbon emissions as Rachel Reeves did yesterday at Davos. We can’t do that.
“And the straightforward truth of the matter is that the planning system on this nation doesn’t safe the local weather ambitions that the federal government has.
“So the reason I went into the planning system and the legal system was to try to shore that up. Until that is shored up, people are going to continue taking legal actions against the government and government decisions which do not protect our climate ambitions.”
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NIMBYs v YIMBYs
Within the Day by day Mail remark piece, Sir Keir identifies Dr Boswell by describing his work, however doesn’t title him.
The accompanying article within the Mail does establish him, nevertheless.
Within the article, Sir Keir writes: “A former Inexperienced Get together councillor spent years attempting to dam important security upgrades to the A47. The case reached the Supreme Courtroom final 12 months, which dismissed it for having ‘no logical foundation’.
Picture:
The A47 east of Norwich, Norfolk, which prompted campaigners to go to the Supreme Courtroom with a view to cease a authorities enchancment plan. Pic: Google Road View
“A top judge even said it had ‘an air of complete unreality’. So why was he able to waste years of the court’s time and squander tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer money?
“There are numerous extra examples of NIMBYs and zealots gumming up the authorized system typically for their very own ideological blind spots to cease the federal government constructing the infrastructure the nation wants.
“They know they have no chance of winning, they just want to drag it out in hope that the government or industry give up. They want to win for themselves, not for the country.”
“First of all, on the court, when we went to the high court, the high court judge actually said that my case had helped highlight issues in the way environmental impact assessments were done.
“And on the security problem, really, what these street schemes are doing is spending £500m on brief stretches of street when there’s rather more harmful black spots in Norfolk.
“I’ve always said we do need to improve safety on the roads in Norfolk, we need to target the black spots, and not spend huge amounts of money digging roads, which doesn’t actually make a big safety improvement.”
