Post 462 - It's Baffling Brexit time!

Hey everyone, today's post 462 and today is the day that Theresa May triggers article 50, and takes the UK out of Europe. It's confusing to say the least. But, everybody understands what's going to happen in terms of immigration and things more towards the human side of it, but how many times have you seen anything about what's going to happen with nature after Brexit in the media? I personally haven't seen anything positive at all, but I don't check the media often. I have covered this in previous posts, but that was way back around the referendum. It's been months since that, and I've been thinking quite a bit about it, but I thought as we're here at this pretty important point in our history, I need to push the message out that the government needs to make better laws for nature.

Anyway, I thought I'd start with the obvious stuff, so, what you'll probably know is that the EU has a load of laws that they've made that are used in all the countries that are in the EU. We have gone by those laws for decades now, so we don't have many of our own, which means that we now have to create our own laws again. Like all votes, laws and other things along these lines, there will be some great decisions, and some bad ones. The EU had some great laws about things such as animal testing. That law was something that I paid particular attention, especially since we actually did two lessons on it at school...

I found this to be very interesting, the fact being that if the school didn't have to cover any part of Brexit at all, but they chose to give up two of my drama lessons to teach us the basics of it, they gave us essentially a reading comprehension of it. We were given a news article about what will happen after Brexit in terms of the laws. It went over that we will have to create our own laws, and that the ones they already have will be scrapped, unless we choose to go with them. There are some great laws about it, such as rabbits cannot be used to test makeup and other products.

Well from what I've read elsewhere I know that's not entirely how things are. Now Article 50 has been triggered the Government will be working on something call the Great Repeal Bill. If I have understood things right that means we will take all of the EU laws and make them UK laws. So things like the Birds and Habitats Directive and other nature laws will be UK laws. This is so we don't have to start writing a whole new set of laws from scratch.

That sounds ok doesn't it?

Well, maybe but there are some laws that will need a bit of a rewrite to make sure they work for the UK so there's one chance for things to change. A group called the Environmental Audit Committee has been looking at this to help make sure the Government does look after the environment properly and they were asking for a new Environment Act before Article 50 was triggered.

The other worrying thing is that all of the laws will be looked at after Brexit and if the Government doesn't think we need them they might get rid of them. If the Government keeps its promise to “be the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than it found it”. Then we might get even better laws?

Well I hope so but it seems not all of the government agrees. I saw this tweet about and article which made me worry..

Let's make sure this article is a one off,a bad dream, quickly forgotten.We cannot let Brexit rob us of our wildlife https://t.co/yH62oS1u2Z

— Stephanie Hilborne (@stephhilborne) 27 March 2017

So I've been wondering what to do. I've been thinking about re-starting my petition but I think I'll wait a little while until some more information comes out like the 25 year Environment and Farming plans that are due to be published.

I've seen a great initiative called GreenerUK which a lot of the UK's big nature organisations support. It has a list of all the MP's that have signed to support this call to make our environmental laws better. I'll be writing to my MP to ask if he will sign it.

I thought that a quick thing I could do is start a Thunderclap to ask people to support Greener UK and try to get more MP's supporting it. I've set it up so that it launches on Earth Day on the 22nd April. I hope that you can support the Thunderclap and tell your MP that we all want stronger protection for wildlife after Brexit.

I just supported A #GreenerUK for #Earthday on @ThunderclapIt // @nerdboy386 https://t.co/HNFYO93CLV

— Zach (@nerdboy386) 30 March 2017

Hope you enjoyed.

Z.