I wrote to my MP, Tom Pursglove, only c10 days ago and have had a rapid response as follows:
Dear Mark,
Thank you for your email.
In it, you pose several questions – the second and third of which I have passed to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, the Rt. Hon George Eustice MP, for response. I will of course let you have sight of any response that I receive.
On the issue of my discussions with Ministers, I can assure you that this is something that I have done. Indeed, I have mentioned that I have received significant levels of correspondence on this issue, and encouraged Ministers to look carefully at the matters raised by the campaign – nothing more, nothing less.
Although I understand it is not directly within her brief, I also expressed similar sentiments when I bumped into the Farming Minister earlier this week.
Alas, rather than being somewhat disbelieving, I would have thought you might have been pleased that your concerns had been raised in this way, and treated with the appropriate seriousness.
With best wishes,
Tom
Tom Pursglove MP
Member of Parliament for Corby & East Northamptonshire
I am, as always, grateful to Mr Pursglove for his help and politeness and I look forward to hearing from DEFRA.
He sounds a little hurt that I doubted whether he had spoken to ministers about my concerns merely on the basis that this was a phrase used by lots and lots of Conservative MPs in what was clearly a standard letter sent to hundreds of constituents across the land.
I am, grateful to Mr Pursglove for his reply but note that he did not, as I asked, tell me which minister he had spoken to (although he’s had a chat with Victoria Prentis, I assume, more recently) nor does he tell me on which date this chat occurred. And therefore my offer of a £50 donation to charity if DEFRA confirmed his account is, sadly, not to be called upon.But I am glad that Mr Pursglove has made ministers aware in some way that he has ha a lot of correspondence on wildlfie crime and unsustainable burning on grouse moors. That’s good.
But I have also heard from DEFRA in reponse to an FoI request to be given the dates of all meetings and conversations with Conservative MPs in response to the recent e-action and their response is quite pithy;
Well, we’ll never know then and are free to make up our own minds.
[registration_form]
Well done Mark on gaining quite a good response from your MP. Whether Defra will shift their ground even a little on all the ills and atrocities associated with DGS in very doubtful. TheTories are very closely allied with the shooters of our wildlife for fun. The more I see of the responses from George Eustice and Natural England the lower my opinion of them goes, if that is possible.
Civil servants must record how ministers spend their time. Can it really be true that they don’t know? They may not know precisely what was said (or even the topic?) but they must know who and when. I don’t believe them.
It is clear they have done nothing. It would be nice to think that Eustice was simply useless but it is much worse than that. He routinely ignores the concerns of the British people because he is in the pockets of the supporters of this rotten government. George Monbiot says that Britain is rotten because of our laundering of the fortunes made by criminals but politically and especially on the conservative side it is rotten all the way through.