I listened to Theresa May’s conference speech and was quite impressed by it – it was quite clever in many ways (full text here). But I still won’t be voting Conservative.
However, there were two sentences that were next to each other that just sum up why the Conservative Party, Michael Gove, Therese Coffey et al should be clamping down on driven grouse shooting (I’d ban it, you know?).
To obey the law, even when you disagree with it.
To conserve our environment, for the next generation.
So why don’t Defra and Natural England have a plan for enforcing the law when it comes to wildlife crime and habitat damage? And why are they apparently great mates with those who break the law, blatantly, and with those who damage our environment and thereby deprive current and future generations?
Interesting insight into how advertising algorithms work. This article was paired with an add for “Country Clothing” featuring a bunch of armed men and women off to shoot things! Must be the mention of shooting that prompted the ad by Schoffel. Or maybe it was the mention of the Conservative Party.
Either way I suspect that we’re not quite the target audience they had in mind…
I see the same thing on YouTube. If I watch videos featuring Mark and others campaigning against driven grouse shooting, suddenly my Home Page gets plastered with shooting videos extolling the virtue of driven grouse shooting and other pro-shooting videos. Not merely are these algorithms stupid, but they are commercially driven. When I used to Google a term to find out about something, a term or concept, I used to get Wikipedia at the top and a lot of useful references. Now when I Google the same word string I get a bunch of links offering to sell me products, and have to wade through pages of dross to find the information.
It’s called institutional corruption. Okay the hereditary peers may not fill the House of Lords any longer, but in reality they are still the power behind the throne in the Conservative Party.
We forget how much influence these people have, because we don’t see it. We don’t see the cosy meetings between the charming grouse moor owners and the senior members of the Conservative Party, and actually with the past Labour government.
To understand what we’re up against, we need to remember what happened when there was an attempt to ban fox hunting under the last Labour government. It should have been a slam dunk. The Labour Party manifesto committed to a free vote on fox hunting. The vast majority of MPs were opposed to fox hunting, the vast majority of the public were opposed to fox hunting, and the Labour government at the time held a huge parliamentary majority. It should have sailed through.
However, what happened was that it took many years to get through parliament. The Labour government got in in 1997, but the act banning hunting didn’t get passed until 2004, and then only by invoking the Parliament Acts. In the end Tony Blair etc, starting getting cold feet and dragging their heels because the establishment was so opposed to it. What’s more, what we got was as much use as a chocolate fireguard, because it allows the hunts to break the law on an almost daily basis with impunity.
Yet fox hunting is practised by a much smaller clique of the establishment than driven grouse shooting, and even many shooters think that tearing foxes to pieces with dogs is beyond the pale. In practise it will be much harder to get through a ban on driven grouse shooting than fox hunting. Remember virtually the whole Royal Family are involved in driven grouse shooting to some extent, along with the whole upper echelons of the establishment. More of them participate in driven grouse shoots, even just by their presence, if not actually shooting, than ever took part in fox hunting.
The reason I make this points is pragmatism, rather than some burning ideological hatred of the establishment. I am not ideological at all, and my only concern is the natural world, and social justice (this is based on principle, not ideology). I purely see these corrupt relationships as a bar to progress, not something to rail against. I make these points not to be defeatist, but to be realistic about what we’re up against. I want to see action, not words. However, to solve a problem, you first need a deep understanding of what the problem and the obstacles are.
I concur with every word of that, especially the final paragraph. Very well stated SteB, thank you.
No matter how big and powerful they think they are they can still have the rug pulled from under their feet – and I think will get a very unpleasant surprise when that happens. If we prove that driven grouse shooting is not helping rural communities and is in fact choking them to death it will become toxic politically the way that fox hunting is becoming so. Keeping in with powerful mates won’t do you any good if doing so costs you enough votes to lose your seat. For the first time I can ever recall the claims made about the economic value of grouse moors to local communities are repeatedly being brought to public attention and questioned – Sue Hayman Labour MP has done it, there’s the YouGov petition for an independent economic study of DGS, and the petition to ban grouse shooting on Yorkshire Water properties is really upfront about claiming grouse shooting is economically harmful. I think this is one hell of a new development. Another nail in the coffin caught my eye yesterday – they’re going to be experimenting with a trial beaver reintroduction near Pickering to see how that could relieve flooding downstream. Great news and isn’t this getting to be uncomfortably close to the grouse moors? Accommodating beavers is hardly going to be compatible with intensive grouse moor ‘management’. If the Pickering experiment is successful – and yes it will be – then there will be calls for further re introductions pretty much where ever people feel they’re under threat from flooding. If any estates say that pro beaver, anti flood schemes can’t take place on ‘their’ land because it would compromise the shooting I wonder what the reaction would be from people whose farms, businesses and homes are under threat from flooding would say? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-45708504
I agree they can still have the rug pulled from under them, and that was the purpose of what I said. It’s to know what we’re up against, so we can create strategies to circumvent this. Essentially what we need is an upwelling of public feeling and support. This is what forces politicians into taking action, and which they cannot ignore.
Sorry if I sounded as if I was contradicting you rather than supporting you, I often have limited PC time and have to ‘rush things out’ – you wrote brilliantly. I know from trying two years on the trot at FoE Scotland AGMs to get them to adopt a formal campaign against bad ‘sporting’ estates that even among its membership there were quite a few who were genuinely fearful that they’d kill off rural communities if they killed off DGS and open hill deer stalking. Turn it round to show the opposite is true that they are driving away jobs – AND that the estates have always known this despite their constant assertions to the contrary – then I can’t see how they’ll survive politically. They might get off with killing hen harriers, but not jobs as well and any politician trying to support them if and when that issue becomes public won’t do themselves any favours.
Don’t worry, I didn’t think you were trying to contradict me. I entirely agree, they can have the rug pulled out from under them. To solve a problem, you first have to be brutally honest about what the problem is. This means understanding where the strengths of these establishment figures are in hindering attempts to tackle their abuses of the system, and finding better ways to pull the rug from under them.
The think they lack is public support. The best they can hope for is to co-opt public apathy or indifference to their cause. This is why it’s essential we get this out into the open, to the wider public so we are not just preaching to the converted. We need to find a way of bringing this issue into the public conscience.
It’s easy to forget that most of the public have no idea what a Hen Harrier is, let alone what is going on across the country on grouse moors and shooting estates in general. Tim Bonner and his ilk are obsessed with Chris Packham, because they are terrified that at some point he may be allowed to say to a large TV audience, what is going on, the public would become enraged, and the apologists for these wildlife criminals would have the rug pulled out from under their feet.
‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ !?