Bees: Liz Truss MP receives our giant card

This morning, 38 Degrees members handed the world’s most-signed greetings card – signed by a whopping 125,000 of us – to the new environment secretary Liz Truss MP. In it, a clear message: protect our bees.

Together, 38 Degrees members asked Truss to do everything in her power to protect bees. Including championing the EU ban on harmful pesticides. The card looked really impressive as it was carried into the Department for Environment!

Truss’ predecessor, Owen Paterson, wasn’t a friend of the bees. Instead, he stood up for pesticide companies and big agribusiness. He made his views clear in an article he wrote for the Telegraph newspaper last week when he brushed aside people calling for a sustainable environment as the ‘Green Blob’.

Liz Truss will be under pressure from the same corporate lobbyists. But now, with our record-breaking card, she also knows that she’s bee-ing watched by thousands of ordinary people. A sobering prospect for any politician in the year leading up to an election.

The likes of Syngenta and other pesticide businesses are waiting in the wings to put in new applications to use harmful pesticides to bees. But together, we’re ready to pull out all the stops to make sure protecting our bees is at the forefront of Liz Truss’s mind.