Climate change: Truants

When UK school students went on strike last month over climate change, Prime Minister Theresa May called them truants and said they were wasting valuable lesson time. So you'd expect the UK government to be diligently goign about its duties, right? Of course not: when parliament held a debate on climate change in response to the school strike, only a handful of government members turned up:

In the week that the UK experienced its hottest ever winter day, just a handful of government MPs attended a debate on climate change in parliament on Thursday.

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, said she had secured the discussion after being inspired by the thousands of UK schoolchildren who went on strike over climate change this month and wanted to thank them for forcing MPs into action.

Moran said climate change had not been debated in the main chamber of the House of Commons for two years. She spoke, however, to a chamber where the seats were predominantly empty. At points, as few as 10 MPs sat on government benches, although the opposition side was more occupied. The lacklustre response to the debate from the government was in stark contrast to the condemnation by Downing Street to the thousands of children involved in the strike for climate change, calling it “truancy”.

For the record, there are currently 314 conservative party MPs, so only one in thirty of them bothered to show up to discuss the most important issue facing the planet today. As for the rest, I guess they had just decided to take the day off. So who are the "truants" again? At least the schoolkids know what's important - unlike the Tories.