Brexit gives us a chance to save our natural world

For people who love the natural world, each new season brings new excitements. We are a nation of nature lovers. We feed the birds in our gardens and we revere David Attenborough. Which makes it surprising that – until now – governments have not cottoned on to how much of a vote-winner concerted action to restore and protect nature can be.

Year in year out the abundance of life around us diminishes. Most adults can remember car windscreens splattered with dead insects after even the shortest of summer journeys. No longer. Insect populations are crashing almost everywhere, and with them everything else. Starlings, which were once so numerous that their vast flocks, known as ‘murmurations’, became a single creature, a huge genie in the sky performing acrobatics in one of nature’s most remarkable sights, have declined by 66% since the 1970s, according to the British Trust for Ornithology. The humble house sparrow has halved in abundance during the same period.