Autumn Newsletter 2025

We live in important times and there is plenty to do, so let’s look back at what we’ve done since last we wrote and what we think it will be important to do in 2026.

Climate Matters Meetings:

We continue to offer our quarterly public Climate Matters meetings with our MP, Charlie Maynard as usual, and our notes from the October meeting are in appendix 1 at the end of this letter. The dates of next year’s meetings are: January 31st, April 25th, July 18th & October 24th.

All meetings are on Saturday mornings from 11am until around 12.30. We hope to see you there.

On the busy agenda for January is a discussion of adaptation and resilience in our constituency with Charlie and West Oxfordshire District Council. We will also hear an announcement on our honesty in politics initiative promised by Charlie after the last meeting. We hope for something important and positive and will, anyway, have progress on honesty in politics on the agenda.

We’ll also ask Charlie to give a short update on the ongoing battle with Thames Water.

The National Emergency Briefing:

There’s a series of TED-type talks - the National Emergency Briefing (www.nebriefing.org) being offered in parliament on November 27th. It’s aimed at parliamentarians but also at nationally important and influential figures. There will be eight talks from major experts on disparate aspects of the climate emergency such as national security, economics, tipping points, food security, public health and more.

Every MP has received a personal invitation and we have asked Charlie to attend but it’s the day after the budget and Charlie, who is now the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury for the Lib Dems, may well have to be in the chamber to debate. However, all is not lost. The organisers are to make a film for distribution in the new year and we intend to take this to venues across the constituency and invite Charlie to attend at least one of these.

Notes from the meeting are here

Our Climate Matters public meeting in Oxford:

Last September we hosted 102 people at a public meeting in Oxford with Lord Deben (chair of the Climate Change Committee for many years), Roz Savage (who introduced the Climate and Nature Bill into parliament) and Pete Sudbury (County Councillor responsible for climate and environment across Oxfordshire until recently).

Our notes of that meeting are here. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from this meeting – many people described it as “inspiring” - and it has stimulated fresh climate action.

Our expert panel: Duncan Enright, Lord Deben, Roz Savage & Pete Sudbury