I hope I’m not being too presumptuous in assuming that our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting is likely to get to 10,000 signatures fairly soon – after all it is already at 9645 signatures. If it gets to 10000 before 1230pm Friday, which looks very likely, then it will have reached that mark on Day 5. Momentum!
The responses from Defra to previous e-petitions have been uniformly dire. I don’t just mean that they have not said what I would have liked them to say, but they have been evasive and uninspiring. If Defra wanted us all to think that they don’t care about the uplands and don’t care about the electorate then they couldn’t really do any better than they have done.
So, as our e-petition heads for the 10,000 signature threshold needed for a government response, will minister Rory Stewart, be applying his ‘acute intelligence’ (Philip Merricks sucking up) to the subject or shall we just get a brush off again?
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10000 at 19.31 24/03/16.
And the next 100 took 24 minutes!
Judging from his responses to questions I asked my MP ( Andrew Jones Con), who asked them of the minister, Rory Stewart, on my behalf about the Hen Harrier (Non) plan and lead ammunition, evasive and uninspiring about covers it.
I will as a result be asking further questions, really just to make some serious points without expecting in reply a better response.
Rory can be very eloquent. Yesterday he said ‘National parks are the soul of Britain’ when launching Defra’s National Park plan, so I hope he can be equally eloquent in response to the petition.
No doubt they will just cut and paste their vapid response from last time….. so I would suggest that as soon as they respond we petition them again on a slightly different tack…. and keep doing this….until they take the issue and our concerns seriously.
Hope you do better than I did with my work on ‘Swift Bricks’! Rory was photographed with a company who was erecting 18 houses all with ‘Swift bricks’ in place. This company erects houses throughout the North of England and Southern Scotland. My question to him was why not every new house in Britain as well as every industrial building.
His reply was ‘We will have to see if they work’!
Funny how Swift Conservation http://www.swift-conservation.org/
and Action for swifts http://actionforswifts.blogspot.co.uk/
all know they work but we have wait for a government minister to see if they do work!!