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Aug 03, 2023

The head of the RSPB has apologised after the wildlife charity called Rishi Sunak and other ministers “liars” in a social media post.

Beccy Speight, the chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said she did not approve the post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that said the UK prime minister, the levelling-up secretary, Michael Gove, and the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, were liars.

The tweet continued: “You said you wouldn’t weaken environmental protections. And yet that’s just what you are doing. You lie, and you lie, and you lie again.”

On Thursday morning, Speight told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

There are lots of things happening at the moment and one of them is this proposal from the government to amend the habitat regulations, to disapply the requirements for nutrient neutrality.

The reason that has made us so frustrated and led to that original tweet is that it completely goes against the commitments that the government has made many times in the past not to weaken environmental protections, most recently when the retained EU law bill was going through in the summer.

So, this completely contravenes those commitments and that’s what’s led us to be so frustrated and so angry about the proposed amendment coming through.

The reason that we issued our apology is that we do believe that the nature of public discourse does matter and that we have a role to play in that, and that we campaign on policy, not on people.

So, the framing of that tweet, where we called out individual people, we felt was incorrect and inappropriate, and we apologise for that.