Where is the right’s compassion for people and the planet? - Yorkshire Post Letters

David Attenborough tells us that we urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels in order to prevent further temperature increases beyond +1.5 degrees, which would lead to "99 per cent of coral reefs being gone in under 30 years and other habitats following."

The world’s climate scientists are demanding action to cut carbon emissions, warning of dire consequences if we don’t. But their immense wealth of expertise and insight is no match for the whimsical musings of the armchair experts, whose spurious views still regularly grace the letters pages.

A severely restricted sphere of compassion is a common characteristic of those on the right of politics to whom sacrificing the interests of wider society and the planet’s future is to them, a price worth paying for imagined benefits nearer to home (they see net-zero as a cost not an opportunity, conveniently ignoring the much larger costs of climate change).

Such is the narrow perspective of my own MP and our current Government, which is why they need to go, for the sake of the greater good (which they do not understand).

The Honourable Members’ obscene inhumanity and lack of compassion is aptly demonstrated almost daily through egregious attitudes and habits of rewarding each other with Honours, partying while we are ‘locked down’ and happily demonising the homeless and refugees in order to gain populist support - while the planet heats, the homeless increase in number (thanks to ’no-fault’ evictions which they promised to end until landlords’ interests won the argument) and families struggle to survive in uninsulated, often mouldy homes.

We need leaders, with others’, not their own interests at heart, people with a wider sphere of compassion, greater understanding and longer perspectives.

To this end I once sent my Tory MP a copy of the Big Issue in the genuine belief that reading it would be an eye-opener for him. Every MP should read it, to better understand people who don’t live the publicly-funded lavish lifestyles than they do.

It was returned on the grounds that MPs are not allowed to accept ‘gifts’ from constituents. ££££ bungs from fossil fuel companies and other polluters are allowed, but not a humble magazine which might, if MPs read it, make them kinder people.