Claire Wright’s final plea to ban bee-harming chemicals blocked by the Conservative machine on the County Council
Claire Wright, who has done more than any politician in East Devon to protect wildlife and our natural environment, used her final meeting as a county councillor to get the Council to call on the government to reverse its recent lifting of the ban on neonicotinoids. This type of insecticide has proved hugely damaging to bees and other pollinators, as well as to birds and water courses.
Devon County Council’s Conservative cabinet proposed their usual watering-down amendment, to merely ask the government to ‘carefully review its consideration of emergency use applications’ of the chemicals.
This was then steamrollered through by the Tory machine despite a passionate – and at time despairing – plea from Claire.
There could be no more eloquent demonstration of why we need to vote out the Conservatives next Thursday. Let’s hope Claire’s legacy will be a new generation of Independent and other opposition county councillors from East Devon and the rest of the County.
Claire has been an inspiration to all of us, and to me as the only other non-Tory county councillor from our district on the current Council, an indispensable colleague for me. She will be sorely missed.
Seaton & Colyton MATTERS 
April 30, 2021 at 1:14 pm
I really don’t understand why anyone would want to deliberately allow these dangerous chemicals to continue devastating our wildlife. More than ever now we need to do everything we can to preserve all wildlife, especially as we are losing species at alarming rates. What part of the word eco-system don’t they understand?
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