Thoughts on today’s Inglorious 12th

I’ve enjoyed today’s Inglorious 12th more than most. I’ve had a relatively relaxing day.

When I watered the vegetables at 6am this morning before making a cup of tea, I had seen the expected news that Labour had come out in favour of licensing grouse shooting. This is very much to be welcomed.

Looking back six years to 2014 I started the first petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting and it wasn’t until the third attempt, in 2016, and it was actually Saturday 13 August 2016, that we first passed 100,000 signatures. I remember where I was, watching the numbers click round and as they hit 100,000 Chris Packham phoned – he’d been transfixed watching the numbers click over just like I had.

2014 saw the first Hen Harrier Days with the biggest being by the Derwent Dam in the pouring rain. And they’ve happened every year since, come rain and shine and come global pandemic too. I’m proud of few things in life, but I am proud of what we kicked off in 2014 and have seen through to now, and we aren’t finished yet. And I’m grateful to all who have built the events over the years.

2015 saw the first edition of Inglorious published and an updated paperback followed in 2016. I’m grateful to my publishers Bloomsbury, for having the courage to publish a polemical book about why we should ban a land use that most people didn’t know existed. I know it was touch and go, but they were right to publish it as they’ve made a few bob from it. For a campaigning book to sell well, well over 5000 copies from the publisher (and I reckon I’ve sold another 1000 or so myself at talks) is amazing. It’s out of print now but it is still being read.

We’ve come a long way, and ‘we’ means an awful lot of us who are gripped by the cause of kicking driven grouse shooting into the past where it belongs. The two biggest influences on me have, of course, been Ruth Tingay and Chris Packham, and the three of us founded Wild Justice in October 2018 as a result of working together on this issue and others. Both of them have a host of irritating habits, and they are so lucky that I have none, but on their days they are quite bearable. Enough about them!

There are a host of people who have come along for the ride, helped fuel or drive the car, map-read, pushed on steep hills and provided bottles of wine or whisky at pit-stops. They are numerous and I know some of them much better over the internet or by sight than in real life. But I’ve met wonderful campaigners, raptor workers, politicians, journalists, fellow conservationists, scientists, artists of so many kinds, birders, lawyers and just so many really, really nice people. It has been great.

And it will continue to be great – there’s no way that we are going to give up. We’ve come a long way together and we’ve done an awful lot to highlight the ills of driven grouse shooting. And I think we’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting. The future won’t be easy but the spread of understanding of the problems of driven grouse shooting is geting more and more rapid. It’s becoming overwhelming. Only the grouse moor managers, their gamekeepers and some in the high ranks of the Tory party can remain wilfully blind to the problems of driven grouse shooting. It’s not a winning strategy.

When I was watering the vegetables this morning the air ponged a bit (you see, I’m not such a townie after all), but I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether it was the stink of chicken slurry, pig slurry or that of the hypocrisy of the Conservative party on this issue. No matter, we will win!

And if you want to give your elected politician a nudge to act for change then please join over 34,000 others in sending them a message through this e-action which is a joint campaign by the RSPB, Hen Harrier Action and Wild Justice. Click here to have a look please thank you!

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