This week I’ve had hundreds of requests from constituents asking me to do three things: demand that key nature protections are kept within UK law and not ripped up by December 2023 as proposed by this Conservative government, demand that the Environmental Land Management Scheme is retained to enable farmers to provide more nature alongside high quality food, and do all I can to make Britain a world leader in protecting nature at home whilst committing to an ambitious global deal for nature at the Convention on Biological Diversity COP 15.

I’ll be replying to you all in person, but in brief, my answer is yes, I will.

But Labour will go further.

Last week the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool focussed on rebuilding Britain from the ground up – with growth driven by investing in ‘all people and all places’ – not giving tax breaks to the rich in yet another Conservative experiment with ‘trickle down economics’ that simply means the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.

Our plans are to drive change and create prosperity for all.

That’s why Labour will create a fossil-fuel-free electricity system by 2030, making the UK a clean energy superpower, exporting clean power to the rest of the world.

We’ll quadruple offshore wind with an ambition of 55GW by 2030, accelerate the pioneering floating offshore wind technology by fast-tracking at least 5GW of capacity, triple solar power to over 50GW and double our onshore wind capacity to 35GW.

We’ll ensure the long-term security of nuclear power, invest in carbon capture, storage and hydrogen to ensure that there is sufficient zero-emission back-up power for extended periods without wind or sun, while maintaining a strategic reserve of backup gas power stations to guarantee security of supply. We’ll double down on green hydrogen and industrial processes like green steel; unleash marine and tidal power, reform planning laws and build out the grid and manage existing oil and gas wells sustainably over the coming decades. This would save UK households £93 billion in energy bills over the rest of this decade.

And we’ll also ban fracking – not just for a few months, but forever.

Labour’s fully costed plans will create over 200,000 direct jobs and up to 300,000 indirect jobs and be funded by a National Wealth Fund, putting an initial £8 billion into a central pot to build British industry.

This means that when public money is spent on these projects, the British people will own a share of that wealth, and benefit from the returns on those investments.

It’s a while since I’ve written this but I still believe that a healthy and happy country relies on a government that supports the many, not the elite few.