Environmental activists disrupted Liz Truss’s Conservative party conference speech, denouncing the prime minister’s “shredding” of her party’s election manifesto promises on protection for nature. As Truss outlined her reasons for the economic policies, implemented just over two weeks after she was elected, Greenpeace UK’s head of public affairs, Rebecca Newsom, and its policy officer, Ami McCarthy, stood up close to the front of the conference hall in Birmingham on Wednesday with a banner asking: “Who voted for this?” Conference delegates responded with boos and snatched the banner from their hands, only for the two women to pull out another, identical banner. “Let’s get them removed,” Truss said, as badged security guards intervened and tried to rip the banner from the women and take their lanyards away. The protest was reminiscent of the one at Theresa May’s conference speech in 2017. As the Greenpeace activists stood, they appeared to brandish one banner that was quickly snatched away, before producing another, which took longer to be wrestled off them. People in the audience booed and shouted “out, out, out” as the protesters were escorted from the hall, their conference passes ripped from their necks, and ejected into the rain, pursued by a gaggle of journalists. In a statement sent moments after the intervention, Greenpeace UK said it had identified at least seven areas across environmental protection, climate action, workers’ rights and tackling inequality where policies considered by Truss’s cabinet contradicted the 2019 Conservative election manifesto. It quoted Newsom as saying: “Who voted for this? In a healthy democracy, people should get the government programme they voted for, but Liz Truss is putting most of it through the shredder.
“People voted for strong action on climate, a fracking moratorium, world-leading environmental protections, and tackling poverty and inequality. What they’re getting instead is fracking, a potential bonfire of rules on wildlife and nature protection, and now the prospect of benefit cuts. “Broken promise after broken promise, the prime minister is quickly turning her party’s manifesto into the longest piece of false advertising ever written. Many will be left wondering whether her government answers to the public or to the hedge fund managers, rightwing thinktanks and fossil fuel giants that are cheering it on. “The chancellor said the government is now listening. If so, they may want to pay attention to the widening chorus of leading businesses, energy experts, former Conservative ministers and even the US president telling them to go in the opposite direction.” She later told reporters: “We feel very confident that the vast majority of the public and indeed many members of the public who even voted for the Conservative party are going to be sympathetic to the message we took inside that conference hall today. “I think we have a lot of support for putting that message forward and it is our role to hold the government to account.”