The House | Bat-bashing was a betrayal

Flock of oystercatchers, Jon Sparks/Alamy

4 min read13 min

Polling is rarely fun reading for Labour MPs at the moment, but a new poll last month proved particularly deflating.

It went beyond simply confirming the public’s overwhelming support for nature restoration – with 8 in 10 people saying it is an important priority for them personally. It also revealed that a resounding 6 in 10 believe the Government cares less about restoring nature than they do.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. I was proud to be elected on a manifesto that recognised nature loss to be one of our greatest challenges, promising ‘to restore and protect our natural world’.  Over the course of 2025, this promise seemed forgotten.

Ministers have too often reached for easy scapegoats – blaming bats and newts for a lack of economic growth. Rather than confronting the reality of a broken model that rewards asset ownership over productive work, and an economy built to reward financial speculation and the extraction of value over the workers who create it.

In the absence of evidence for these claims, ministers resorted to a steady drumbeat of anti-nature rhetoric. In doing so, goodwill from millions of nature lovers across the country was needlessly eroded.

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The views of well-funded lobbyists, keen to cut corporate costs through deregulation, seemed to carry more weight than the concern of millions of voters that, with each passing year, they were seeing less wildlife in gardens, parks and rivers.

This is why I kickstarted the Red Lines for Nature campaign this winter: to get Britain’s nature- loving majority off the backfoot and to break the doom-loop of the constant attacks on our wildlife habitats.

The campaign calls for an end to attempts to weaken environmental protections and environmental bodies. These are the red lines which, if passed, will accelerate nature decline towards the point of no return.

Crossing these red lines would signal a calamitous broken promise for our Labour Government, situating itself on the wrong side of a nature-loving electorate, and a disaster for the ecosystems we all need to survive.

It has been galvanising to see the nature sector rally so decisively around the Red Lines campaign; with dozens of organisations’ signing up; and ever-increasing support from colleagues on the backbenches in Westminster.

It’s no coincidence that our bold demand of a fully funded nature recovery plan has coincided with a welcome change in approach: both in language and actions from the government.

The tedious bat-bashing of 2025 has vanished from ministerial speeches and 2024 promises to save nature have returned.

Damaging proposals to gut nature protections, recommended by the Nuclear Regulatory Review, have been dropped. And Defra has announced a series of ambitious nature recovery policies, including the largest ever government investment in threatened species; supporting iconic birds like turtle doves and oystercatchers, as well as the reintroduction of golden eagles to England offering the hope of a trophic cascade that restores long-degraded ecosystems as their apex predators soar back into place.

This shows that when we are united, bold and clear in our demands, we can win. It is vital that we maintain the pressure through the Red Lines for Nature campaign across all its layers of support – from environmental organisations and their mass memberships to the nature-loving public, and its allies in Parliament.

In doing so, we can move beyond winning individual skirmishes and instead make it clear that the protection of nature is not, and should never have been, up for debate.

This policy shift has come just in time. Recent weeks have emphasised how important it is to prepare for future economic disruption, and to make sure the UK is well-prepared to weather economic storms. Nature-loss is the economic disruption we can see coming over the horizon. In January Defra published a new security assessment warning that ‘global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity’. We need to get ahead of this gathering crisis, by helping nature recover before it’s too late.

This is why colleagues and I, along with MPs from other parties, will be gathering in Westminster to hear the latest from nature experts about the scale of species loss, and what more needs to be done to halt it. We still have time, just, to back away from the red lines and to act on the priorities of the wildlife-loving British public.

The renewal of our nation’s squandered natural wealth could be the common endeavour that finally instils some optimism and unity into our politics, at a time when we all need hope. After all, More in Common polling for the National Trust found that nature is a major source of pride for the public, second only to the NHS.

Building on the recent policy shift to deliver an ambitious nature recovery plan would be hugely popular and would bring people together. This spring, its time embrace the pride and positivity of restoring nature, for everyone.