Keir Starmer has been accused of “pathetic bullying” by a Norfolk environmental campaigner who was singled out and ridiculed by the prime minister in an article in the Daily Mail.
Sir Keir heaped scorn on Andrew Boswell across the first five paragraphs of an article in the tabloid, headlined “We’ll stop the time-wasting NIMBYs and zealots from holding the country to ransom”.
Dr Boswell, a computer scientist, now brands himself an environmental consultant and challenges road and other projects in the courts which he argues break environment, nature and habitat laws.
Speaking to Sky News this afternoon, Dr Boswell said: “I think it’s disgraceful that he called out an individual in this way. And someone who is not able to protect themselves easily.
“I think it’s a very dangerous thing for the prime minister to do, and he shouldn’t have approached it this way.”
Asked why he thought it was dangerous, Dr Boswell replied: “Well, he has named me. I’m just an ordinary person, a member of the public. I go about my life on that basis. I don’t have a vast media team to protect me. I don’t have other protections. It’s a very dangerous thing to do to an individual.”
Dr Boswell said, following the attack, that Keir Starmer should understand the government is failing to uphold its climate ambitions and that he wants to discuss this with the PM.
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“Keir Starmer ought to actually meet me, and I’d like to talk to him about the climate emergency and the fact that you can’t just dismiss carbon emissions as Rachel Reeves did yesterday at Davos. We can’t do that.
“And the simple fact of the matter is that the planning system in this country does not secure the climate ambitions that the government has.
“So the reason I went into the planning system and the legal system was to try to shore that up. Until that is shored up, people are going to continue taking legal actions against the government and government decisions which do not protect our climate ambitions.”
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In the Daily Mail comment piece, Sir Keir identifies Dr Boswell by describing his work, but does not name him.
The accompanying article in the Mail does identify him, however.
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In the article, Sir Keir writes: “A former Green Party councillor spent years trying to block vital safety upgrades to the A47. The case reached the Supreme Court last year, which dismissed it for having ‘no logical basis’.
“A top judge even said it had ‘an air of complete unreality’. So why was he able to waste years of the court’s time and squander tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer money?
“There are countless more examples of NIMBYs and zealots gumming up the legal system often for their own ideological blind spots to stop the government building the infrastructure the country needs.
“They know they have no chance of winning, they just want to drag it out in hope that the government or industry give up. They want to win for themselves, not for the country.”
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Asked whether the PM was correct to write this, Dr Boswell told Sky News: “No, he’s absolutely not, in several respects there.
“First of all, on the court, when we went to the high court, the high court judge actually said that my case had helped highlight issues in the way environmental impact assessments were done.
“And on the safety issue, actually, what these road schemes are doing is spending £500m on short stretches of road when there’s much more dangerous black spots in Norfolk.
“I’ve always said we do need to improve safety on the roads in Norfolk, we need to target the black spots, and not spend huge amounts of money digging roads, which doesn’t actually make a big safety improvement.”
Sky News has contacted Number 10 for a response.
