BASC say they are launching a 7-figure Fighting Fund for ‘proactive legal initiatives to secure the future of shooting’ whatever that means.
Quite what this will do for BASC’s membership is difficult to see – they will have to decide whether their membership subscriptions are being well spent. At the moment BASC isn’t asking for donations so presumably this Fighting Fund is borrowing money from BASC’s well known ‘Sulking Fund’, ‘Moaning Fund’ and ‘Mouthing Off Fund’.
Maybe BASC is going to send a cheque to ANtural England to help fund action against the WIld Justice challenge of the legality of licensing free shooting. Does BASC think Badgers are fair game?
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It probably means they’ve hired a new PR firm, and we’ll soon be seeing a plethora of articles and tv spots in magazine shows; all full of the same old dog whistles, coded language, and insinuations about “real” country folk and “traditional” country pursuits, and the war the “townie” and “urban” folks in their “ivory towers” is supposedly waging on them. It’ll be distilled Brexit propaganda, mark my words.
Now the real danger is that the British public are really fucking stupid and always on the look out for a new target to bully, and that target could easily become progressive social policy. It is easy to mock the beer swilling bullies of the John Bull lobby, I mean super easy, they make it really really really easy, but thick attracts fucking thick and the UK public is super thick. So Wild Justice and LACS should absolutely be looking to hire as top flight a PR team as they can afford too. Try and direct the thicko mob against the Lords and Lairds before they do it to us.
Addenda: I think I am really underselling how thick and rage-y the thickos of the British public really are. However contemptible, stupid, and hateful you think they are, multiply that by ten, and you might get in the neighbourhood.
What they really mean is not a fund to secure the future of shooting but a fund to fight legitimate concerns that shooting is currently far too unrestricted. They want not to preserve shooting but preserve the present unsatisfactory situation, shooting without the proper reasonable controls, as applied in nearly every other country. There was me thinking, sometime ago, that BASC were the sensible end of the shooting lobby, silly me, you live and learn.
So not a lobbying fund? Not a PR budget? No setting up of shaddow organisations for gasslighting opperations?
Definitely not hiring private investigators to hang around notable hunt abolitionist’s houses and go through their rubbish in the hope of finding something to slander them with. I’m sure they wouldn’t be doing that.
I am all in favour of “proactive legal initiatives”. Two examples, Wild Justice and police enforcement spring to mind. Wild Justice, which I suspect is the cause of their angst, seems to be extremely effective on just a fraction of the proposed budget required by the BASC. Keep up your good and cost effective work!
There are laws of this land and the general idea is that we respect and keep on the right side of them. It is illegal to shoot, trap or poison raptors. If all shooting interests respected the current legal position and abided by the law most of their problems would disappear leaving them with plenty of cash in the bank.
Take a listen to Farming today aired this morning 5.45….. interview with BASC and lots of very poor representation of wild justice and what has happened over general licencing, etc….https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kwxy
It will probably make you really annoyed over just how poor their reporting of non-facts was……….Mark, I assume you are still trying to work out just HOW they summarised the whole sorry saga quite so poorly.
Your right Louise it was crap reporting but then FT nearly always has crap reporting of things one knows about, so I assume the whole programme is the same. It was also the same old shite from BASC. A few bad apples better they said nothing than that sad old chestnut.