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Interesting article in the Spectator

udderlyoffroad

By udderlyoffroad,
in General Shooting Matters

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udderlyoffroad

udderlyoffroad

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Good article in the Spec' (Paywall, but sign up with a throw-away email address to read for free).  As usual no-one who matters will read it and reflect on it, but you can live in hope.

One of the comments below the article, though bleak in nature, sums it up:

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Oh come on....you cannot be serious. the RSPB, Natural England, Defra like all charities, NGO's and public bodies have been totally captured by the Liberal Progressives march through our institutions.

Of course the management at Natural England viscerally hates the Tories and hates even more fieldsports, (bloodsports to them), which they see as white privileged Tories at play.

Of course they will ignore all the benefits to the environment, the countryside, the wildlife havens, of all the shooting woods and fox coverts and all the thick hedges deliberately not dug up and farmed so as to be refuges for game birds and foxes. Many thousands of quiet secure places for all wildlife and not just gamebirds and foxes, dotted throughout our countryside made, maintained and used by fieldsport enthusiasts.

Of course they want to replace it with the latest greenwash fantasy of rewilding and rewetting. Of course they fail to see the wild barren beauty of the sheep farmed Lake district and want to replace it with thousands of acres of unsightly thorn bushes, long grass and a mismash of trees.

The metropolitan Liberals of the type that run Natural England dont like things. Instead they hate things. They hate Britain, they hate the countryside, they hate landowners, they hate farmers and farming, they hate the Tory supporting trolls that live there and they absolutely loath fieldsports.

Of course they want to rewild, They want to destroy the very soul of the British Countryside and remake and refashion it and its inhabitants to force it to adhere to their urban utopian fantasies.

 

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PeterHenry

PeterHenry

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Full text - 

If a general election is held, as is rumoured, in November next year, Labour could return to power exactly 20 years after the Hunting Act was passed, and there is the very real possibility of field sports being finished off altogether. Then, the government’s assault on hunting was a long, bloody, open conflict. Today, the campaign against countryside pursuits is more covert – a gradual process of lawfare. Over the past two decades, more and more regulation has crept in. Field sports and the rural economy that surrounds them are suffering. The groups set up to protect rural England often now work against the interests of both gamekeepers and farmers, with the result that the countryside is being drained of the people who understand and can conserve it best.

When shoots face ruin, workers lose their jobs and ecosystems that were well maintained are destroyed

One of the most chaotic recent additions to the regulatory burden on shooting is the emergency change to licensing which Defra and its semi-autonomous offshoot Natural England rushed through in response to last year’s avian flu. Under the new rules, anyone who wants to release gamebirds on or within 500 metres of a Special Protection Area for wild birds has to apply for an individual licence.

Defra’s risk assessment on the spread of avian flu was finalised in October and yet the shooting industry was not consulted about the changes before they were announced in May. Shoots which were once covered under their general licence had to scramble for the new paperwork. Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, estimates that 140 shoots have been affected. They usually need to start planning for the next season in December or January, so for many the new requirements have been a calamity. Shoots had paid tens of thousands in deposits, feed had been ordered, game cover had been planted. When shoots face ruin, it’s not just trigger-happy toffs who miss out: rural workers lose their jobs and previously well-maintained ecosystems are damaged.

Mike Quick, a gamekeeper on Salisbury Plain, says that his shoot is in trouble. For the last 26 years he’s been with the Royal Artillery Shoot, which organises non-profit shoots for veterans and serving soldiers. The timing of Defra and Natural England’s decision means that this year is a write-off. ‘I could end up losing my job next week,’ he says. ‘We don’t know where we stand. We’ve been around for almost a century. We support the local community, we support veterans, we support the youngsters – and the flick of a pen has ruined everything.’ The new rules, he says, came ‘completely out of the blue. No thought, no notice.’

‘They took the decision not to have any consultation with the shooting industry at all,’ says Bernard Moss, a sporting manager for two shooting estates on the North York Moors, who says he’s been ‘thrown under the bus’ by the new rules. ‘We didn’t hear anything at all until the compulsory 21 days before the changes to the licence. That’s the point they decided it was all right to tell us what was going on. Trying to solve all the problems at the stage at which they told us isn’t physically possible.’

Legislation without proper warning or consultation is very much a green activist’s M.O. It’s how town councils have forced through the unpopular Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and how in 2019 Natural England took aim at Britain’s farmers. Without consultation, in response to a threat of legal action from Chris Packham’s environmentalist group Wild Justice, Natural England cancelled three general licences for controlling wild birds, which made it impossible for farmers to protect young lambs and crops.

Many in the shooting world have come to the conclusion that Natural England, which is officially neutral on shooting, does not have their interests at heart. ‘They’ve shown their intentions,’ Moss says. ‘There is a dislike of country pursuits in general in Natural England. They don’t see any of the conservation benefits – all they see is someone killing something.’

Senior figures at Natural England don’t help to allay concerns. Tony Juniper, the chairman, stood as the Green party candidate for Cambridge in 2010 on a manifesto pledge to ‘maintain the ban on hunting with dogs and extend it to other blood sports’. Juniper insists his eco-activist days are behind him, but his old friends do him few favours. When his position was announced in 2019, Mark Avery, the co-founder of the staunchly anti-shooting Wild Justice, wrote on his website: ‘If Andrew Sells [the outgoing chairman] was never “one of us”, Tony has never been anything else. It’s a strong unambiguous signal of intent.’

Part of the trouble is that Natural England is obsessed with rewilding and rewetting, and cares little for other conservation methods even if they serve to help protected species. Witness the fact that the rushed licensing changes may in fact endanger the very birds the group is trying to shield. Not only have there been no known cases of avian flu among protected species on Salisbury Plain – if gamekeepers such as Quick lose their livelihoods, then, without vermin control on the land, those rare ground-nesting birds Natural England care so much about will be eaten by foxes.

Yet it could have been even worse. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) urged the government to go further, calling for an ‘immediate moratorium’ on the release of gamebirds across the entire country for the year.

The RSPB, bound as it is by Royal Charter, is also officially neutral on shooting, even while it proposes a shutdown of the entire industry for a year in the name of the precautionary principle. The relationship between the RSPB and the shooting community is as fraught as it has ever been. There is almost no issue of land management on which the two see eye to eye. In March, the head of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), in an open letter to the RSPB’s chairman, accused the charity of having an ‘increasingly negative’ attitude towards shooting and ‘sowing division’ inside rural communities. His attacks follow a formal letter of concern sent to the RSPB from the Regional Moorland Groups in 2021 claiming that it is inciting hostility against people who work on the moors. A year later, the complaint was brought before the charity commission, who refused to investigate. Next month the whole matter will be passed to the Parliamentary Ombudsman at Westminster for review.

Countryside groups have been trying to use lawfare to fight lawfare. BASC, for instance, is launching a judicial review against Defra and Natural England for their licensing decision, arguing that since shoots had no prior knowledge of the change, they could reasonably expect to continue to operate under their existing licences.

Ian Gregory, a fiercely pro-shooting campaigner, has this week set up a new political party, Rural Reaction, to stand 40 candidates in Tory seats. ‘The only thing that wakes up politicians is the threat of losing their jobs,’ he says. ‘The outgoing Conservatives need to hear that they have made the countryside a worse place in their 13 years in power.’

The squeeze on country life doesn’t just come from public bodies. Some corporations have thought it wise to signal that they’re on what they assume to be the right side of history. Last week the Telegraph reported that shoots and hunts have had their bank accounts closed down or have been banned by their card reader provider from taking payment. The water company United Utilities, the UK’s largest corporate landowner, has been flip-flopping over whether to end grouse shooting across its land. In its case, grandstanding on grouse also provides a useful distraction from the fact that last year the company discharged untreated sewage into Britain’s rivers and seas almost 70,000 times.

It’s an unhappy picture. But it could get worse. Policies introduced by the devolved governments are seen as something of a harbinger of what’s to come nationally. A wildlife management bill is going through the Scottish parliament to introduce a licensing system for land to be used to shoot grouse. Wales has banned game shooting on public land and there is also a proposal to introduce licensing for all game releases throughout the country.

Speaking in the Senedd during the consultation on shooting licences, Julie James, Wales’s minister for climate change, left no room for doubt as to her beliefs: ‘I do not think killing anything as a sport or leisure is anything that any civilised society should support.’ On the day of James’s speech, Tim Weston of the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation says he has received many fearful messages from Welsh gamekeepers asking if he could find them and their families jobs in England.

‘The outgoing Conservatives need to hear that they have made the countryside a worse place’

But will England be safe for long? ‘I’m immensely concerned about the future,’ says Moss. ‘Me losing my job, in the way of the world, is a small thing. But the effect on the countryside of taking that management away – I don’t think they have any comprehension of what happens at all. None.’

Even bloodless field sports could suffer. On Boxing Day last year, Jim McMahon, the shadow environment secretary, said it was his ambition to outlaw trail hunting (hounds chasing a laid scent rather than live quarry).


Labour’s reasoning is that trail hunting is often a ‘smokescreen’ for illegal hunting, so banning it would essentially toughen the Hunting Act. In May, LabourList’s leak of the party’s 2024 draft manifesto included a pledge to ‘close loopholes in the fox-hunting ban’. It’s all too easy to imagine a Starmer government making it unlawful to take out a pack of hounds on the assumption that something illegal might happen.

Some organisations have even helpfully pre-empted a change to the law. The National Trust, for instance, stopped allowing trail hunts on its land in 2021, citing the ‘risk of reputational harm’.

Would it be wise for a Labour government to go after field sports yet again? The Labour peer Lord Mandelson thinks it’s best to let sleeping hounds lie. ‘We should not be using government for one half of society to impose their preferences on the other,’ he tells me. ‘Majoritarian city dwellers should not dictate how the rural minority conduct their lives. We have reached a good legislative balance on field sports and Labour should not open up some fresh campaign on pastimes they might not like or enjoy but which are a legitimate part of others’ lives.’ A future Labour government, he says, should not be ‘banning, finger-wagging, intolerant’.

That seems a pretty forlorn hope.

William Moore

Edited by PeterHenry
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harkom

harkom

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I recall that the Bliar New Labour gov dangled the anti-hunting bill as a diversionary carrot before the party donkeys for a lengthy part of their administration - most probably designed to deflect the attention of the herd from the other debacles driven by the blaircampbellbrown cabal.

Who is to say that they won't try it again? After all it worked once before.....and most of the donkeys will be preoccupied in sourcing all potential freebies in the Westminster/Edinburgh/Wales troughs. 

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enfieldspares

enfieldspares

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23 minutes ago, PeterHenry said:

I bet you're great fun to sit next to in the pub....

Better a realist though than some of the Farage fan boy fantasists that think voting UKIP, or Reform, or whatever else it's called this week will, they enthrall, "get handguns back". Shooting is doomed because the NRA sold us down the river and BASC is happy to continue to think that it somehow has the ear of an "old boy network" that was killed dead in the 1980s by Thatcherism and Blairism.

Edited by enfieldspares
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PeterHenry

PeterHenry

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14 minutes ago, enfieldspares said:

Better a realist though than some of the Farage fan boy fantasists that think voting UKIP, or Reform, or whatever else it's called this week will, they enthrall, "get handguns back". Shooting is doomed because the NRA sold us down the river and BASC is happy to continue to think that it somehow has the ear of an "old boy network" that was killed dead in the 1980s by Thatcherism and Blairism.

I would agree regarding realism. However, I don't think we are necessarily in a worse place than any other european country - and no industry would continue to invest so heavily if they thought the end was nigh.

Likewise, while politicians talk about reforming gun laws / regulating game shooting - they aren't talking about banning it. (Obviously there are nuances around what licensing entails, etc)

Anyway, I'm perfectly happy to agree that we are moving towards less tolerant times - and I also agree that shooting is likely to change - but then it it has done before.

I'm just not quite so pessimistic as some are.

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enfieldspares

enfieldspares

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Once upon a time there was this:

http://leelum.com/blog/the-house-of-pew-pew-pew/

Macmillan shot game, Alec Douglas-Home shot game. I doubt any Prime Minister since has? At least Sunak represents a grouse shooting area. What I do find disappointing is that Labour the so called party of the working man has never committed to that most non-patrician of all shooting live quarry....woodpigeon shooting and reclassed pigeons the same as the grey squirrel. Truly we have a cohort of MPs who have no direct connection in many cases to shooting or shooting sports. 

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PeterHenry

PeterHenry

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4 hours ago, enfieldspares said:

Once upon a time there was this:

http://leelum.com/blog/the-house-of-pew-pew-pew/

Macmillan shot game, Alec Douglas-Home shot game. I doubt any Prime Minister since has? At least Sunak represents a grouse shooting area. What I do find disappointing is that Labour the so called party of the working man has never committed to that most non-patrician of all shooting live quarry....woodpigeon shooting and reclassed pigeons the same as the grey squirrel. Truly we have a cohort of MPs who have no direct connection in many cases to shooting or shooting sports. 

Cameron shot and Rishi Sunak shoots - but I don't know about any of the others.

I very much agree with you over your remarks about Labour - and sadly refer you to the Banwen Miners Hunt, the fate of which I think is due to the same root as your surprise re Labour / woodpigeon shooting

But shooting is big business compared to hunting. What business concerns / tax revenue went when Hunting was banned? Shootings a different beast all together - far more take part, and far more jobs are at risk - which isn't to say its invulnerable for a moment - but it is in our favour.

When I find myself worrying about these things - the two things that occur to me are -

Very few countries in the world have an outright ban on guns or 'hunting'

Where politicians talk of reforming shooting, they - by definition - aren't talking of banning shooting

Edited by PeterHenry
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old man

old man

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20 hours ago, PeterHenry said:

I hate to say it, but there won't be any future for it if we all strike that tone....

Don't interpret the tone as having given up but the actual reality of our situation is dire?

The actual, unseen in most cases reality, is that gun owners are being marginalised at every opportunity by all who have the opportunity on every occasion possible? This being possible as there is no constitutional or other protection?

16 hours ago, PeterHenry said:

I bet you're great fun to sit next to in the pub....

Personally I favour sitting next to a realist than a dreamer.

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PeterHenry

PeterHenry

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1 hour ago, old man said:

Personally I favour sitting next to a realist than a dreamer.

True - but i'd also rather sit next to a realist than a pessimist.

If everyone just consigns themselves to giving up, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

I would class my self as a conservative - conservatism is as much about change as it is about continuity - because the second presupposes the first.

It's foolish to presume that things will never change - but resigning ourselves unnecessarily to defeat is a surefire way to guarantee it.

1 hour ago, old man said:

Don't interpret the tone as having given up but the actual reality of our situation is dire?

👍

Edit - I skim read your post and missed this bit

I would agree that there are a lot of challenges at the moment - some home grown, and others imported. Re your point about constitutional protection - that's just a fact of life with our legal system - there is very little, if any constitutional protection for any law - they can all be voted away with a simple majority.

In my mind - and there are signs of effort being put into this now - in order to shape and protect laws, you have to promote a culture that then bubbles up.

Food is a big part of shooting and culture - so that's the obvious intersection. You hear an awful lot more about venison now than you use to.

UK Game Assurance and the Country Food Trust both do excellent work to this end - the same with Forestry England / Highland Game / East Lancashire Hospital Trust putting venison on the menu in hospitals. A few years ago, I bought whole Grouse from Iceland. 

I think we often make the mistake of looking at shooting as just an activity - we need to see it as a whole sphere of interrelated activities and culture - and that's how we can demonstrate and justify how it fits and continues to fit into the world.

We need to show people that shooting is as much about pulling the trigger as painting is about applying paint to canvas. On the face of it, both of these things are true - however, it would be a sorry person who leads a diminished life that just sees paint when they look at a painting. That's taken as granted - so we need to make the same argument for shooting.

Edited by PeterHenry
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Scully

Scully

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7 hours ago, oowee said:

Its a pity an appeal over the decisions of both DEFRA and NE and the lack of proper consultation cannot now be made to the European courts. 

Trolltastic! 😂 Nice try but it wouldn’t work; it had already been tried following the shootings in Dunblane, when UK governments - the outgoing cons which proposed a cf ban and an incoming lab which proposed an outright ban - despite Lord Cullens recommendations against an outright ban. 👍
 

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old man

old man

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2 hours ago, Scully said:

Trolltastic! 😂 Nice try but it wouldn’t work; it had already been tried following the shootings in Dunblane, when UK governments - the outgoing cons which proposed a cf ban and an incoming lab which proposed an outright ban - despite Lord Cullens recommendations against an outright ban. 👍
 

What else could be  expected from the trough suckers, looking to gain a  few more votes? Their objective is clear?

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