Les Wallace – congratulations!

Mark 10 Comments

Congratulations! And well done, Les Wallace!

You have triggered a response from Defra.

More on this tomorrow.

Night night all!

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10 Replies to “Les Wallace – congratulations!”

  1. Absolutely brilliant achievement Well done indeed Les.
    I expect there will be some meaningless response from Defra supporting driven grouse shooting and all its abuses of other animals and the environment. Even if this is the case and no doubt it will be, Les’s achievement is an important milestone in the campaign to ban driven grouse shooting and all the very nasty practices that go with it.

    1. I guess you’re, sadly, right, but in that case, Defra will show that they are not in the slightest bit interested in proven facts, the truth or scientific results. Therefore, they will prove, categorically, who’s side they are on.

  2. Well done Les. And well done Mark, I’m sure Les would be the first to say you’ve made the difference. So now we look forward to a mindlessly useless Government response. It’s a reward worth having, just another small step amongst many towards the end of this ludicrous and damaging ‘sport’.

    1. Yes I would and he has! There was a tremendous amount of behind the scenes work even don’t know about. Team4Nature have also been excellent, and I know Mark helped secure their support. This is just the very beginning for this issue in the fight against DGS, we’ve barely scratched the surface. Thanks for your help too Alan, couldn’t meet a nicer bloke.

  4. Well done indeed Les and thankyou. This may turn out to be a very valuable contribution to cause, if only to highlight the fact that we will win dispite the large NGOs largely ignoring the issue. Also of course, it should have been supported by all those that maintain DGS is good for the economy. It isn’t. It never was. It never will be.
    Well, they’ve had their chance.

  5. Well done Les. It will be fun to see what weasle words DEFRA come up with in response. At least when they commit something to paper as it were it will be up for a challenge.

  6. Bit late getting to this, had a few things to do, but just want to say yet again an absolutely massive thank you to one and all for outstanding support right from the beginning and especially in bringing in the extra signatures in the past few weeks. This time last week the petition was sitting at about 5,220 after 24 weeks, today it’s over 10,300 as I type so it’s nearly doubled. That’s principally due to people like Mark (and Andrea, Gavin, Terry, etc, etc…) pulling out all the stops and getting Team4Nature on board, cajoling, tweeting, facebooking our way to the 10,000th signature last night at 10.23pm and the delightful message ‘Government will respond’ at the bottom of the petition page.

    I don’t have any more than a fuzzy idea who did what exactly and know there was a tremendous effort on the part of many and a big thanks to everybody will have to suffice (Mark definitely made a really big commitment in time and effort, the conspicuous retweeting and posting was only a small part of it). Whatever the response is it’s going to cause problems, they may have to say they will commission an independent report and that could maybe buy them sometime, but not too much. How any economist will be able to write up a credible looking (but invalid) study that paints driven grouse shooting in a rosy economic light is utterly beyond me or I suspect anyone else. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear although you can try to lie that a sow’s ear is a silk purse and they’ve been doing that far too long.

    If they try and say we don’t need such a study then that sets the stage for a second petition. My only hope for this one was to reach 10,000 to get a government response, and that only came at the eleventh hour. So it might seem a bit delusional to say looking back it shouldn’t have been all that difficult for it to have reached 100,000 even this time really. It wasn’t. I’ll leave the details behind that comment for a later date and hopefully explain then why I think a petition2 (is ‘A Study to Determine if Driven Grouse Shooting Creates or Costs Jobs’ a better title?) is a serious goer if we need it. The timing of this petition could hardly have been better planned (but it wasn’t it was purely to begin at the start of the grouse shooting season) – ‘poor’ grouse shooting season so rural businesses even worse off than usual, succession of Labour MPs speaking up against DGS especially its over blown economic value, Revive starting in Scotland.

    Wonderful, unfortunately this was more than counter acted by the utterly abysmal ‘luck’ it had in getting institutional support. As a Tory Councillor in the Forest of Bowland enthusiastically signed the petition (I saw the figure jump up one on the petition map in his constituency) that means to my knowledge I received higher level support from the conservatives than I did from the Labour Party – that’s absolutely true and isn’t for want of me approaching Labour MPs and local branches either. I made contact with a couple of local activists who were genuinely supportive and tried to take things forward – they couldn’t. Labour are almost as low as LACS in my opinion right now.

    After my chronic disappointment with LACS (England not Scotland) I tried to get Animal Aid to endorse the petition. As there’s a reference to angling in it (a valid reason it’s there, nothing to do with endorsing it necessarily) they refused to do so. When I went to the petitions team to see if the wording could be changed they told me it was too late and too many people had already signed so it had to stay as it was. For five and a half months it’s been like that. Hope I’m not sounding like a martyr, but it’s been farcical to infuriating to get support from those who should’ve given it. That doesn’t have to happen if there’s a next time.

    Anyway thanks again, feeling of tremendous relief just now which I haven’t had in months!!! Cheers.

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