\n<\/p>\n
A Reform-led council is thought to have become the first in the UK to rescind its climate emergency declaration, a move condemned as \u201ca very dark day\u201d for the authority.<\/p>\n
Durham county council, which has had an overwhelming Reform majority since the May local elections, passed a motion to rescind a declaration made in 2019. More than 300 local authorities have declared a climate emergency.<\/p>\n
It voted instead to declare a County Durham care emergency, a move described as \u201ccynical and insulting\u201d by the Liberal Democrat councillor Mark Wilkes.<\/p>\n
He said there was a financial case as well as an environmental case for keeping the declaration.<\/p>\n
Wilkes said the council\u2019s climate action had helped save more than \u00a313m in the last year alone. He added that stopping work on tackling the climate crisis would risk the loss of external funding. It ran the risk of less money to invest in social care, he said. \u201cThis is not an either-or.\u201d<\/p>\n
During a sometimes fractious and bad-tempered debate on Wednesday, the Reform council leader, Andrew Husband, said the authority was now driven by data and common sense.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the Roman-occupied era not far away from County Durham, around 45AD, there is evidence of Roman vineyards along Hadrian\u2019s Wall. This is because the Roman period in Britain is known for having a relatively warm climate which would have been conducive to growing grapes. Mind, how the climate has changed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kenny Hope, a Reform councillor, accused the Lib Dems of being in favour of adult and child slave labour. He said the mining of material for lithium batteries was \u201crife with child slavery\u201d as was the production of solar panels in China.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not believe in child or adult slave labour and I believe the guys on this side of the house also do not believe in it. But I believe the guys on the other side must believe in adult or child slave labour because they have not took that into consideration,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Darren Grimes, a former GB News presenter, prolific tweeter and now deputy leader of the council, proposed the motion and accused his opponents of wanting to make local residents \u201ccolder and poorer \u2026 shame. Shame. Shame.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said Durham was done \u201cwith expensive virtue-signalling tripe\u201d and said the 2019 declaration was \u201ca feel-good\u201d one chasing \u201cnet-zero rainbows while the likes of China belch out coal more than Sauron\u2019s Mordor\u201d.<\/p>\n
Afterwards, Jonathan Elmer, one of the council\u2019s two Green members, described some of what he heard in the debate as \u201cbonkers\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said the vote represented \u201ca very dark day\u201d for the council. \u201cEighty per cent of the population do believe in the climate emergency and want to do something about it. Durham has an administration that doesn\u2019t. They\u2019ve got a head-in-the-sand, don\u2019t-look-up approach,\u201d Elmer said.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Wilkes said he was concerned for his nine-year-old son. \u201cI want to know he can grow up and live in a country and on a planet that is safe. There is a personal aspect to everything, isn\u2019t there?\u201d<\/p>\n On Monday, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, warned MPs about the climate crisis, saying he would explicitly call out politicians who rejected net zero policies for betraying future generations.<\/p>\n The duration of the Durham council debate was short because of rules limiting it to 30 minutes. A move by Wilkes to have a fuller debate was voted down by Reform.<\/p>\n The rules also meant there was no time for another motion by Grimes to strengthen what he described as free speech protections in the code of conduct for elected members.<\/p>\n Before the debate, about 200 protesters gathered outside county hall with banners and placards highlighting the climate crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cReform is asking you bury your head in the sand,\u201d read one. \u201cOur children need a healthy world,\u201d said another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Reform-led council is thought to have become the first in the UK to rescind its climate emergency declaration, a move condemned as \u201ca very dark day\u201d for the authority. Durham county council, which has had an overwhelming Reform majority since the May local elections, passed a motion to rescind a declaration made in 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[186,914,4324,4323,1274,2225,4322,1681],"class_list":{"0":"post-11084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-climate","9":"tag-council","10":"tag-county","11":"tag-durham","12":"tag-emergency","13":"tag-pledge","14":"tag-reformled","15":"tag-scraps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}