There really aren’t that many people involved in grouse shooting – it’s a niche hobby for the rich invented in the Victorian age and clinging on by its fingernails in the modern world. But once you get your eye in, you see them popping up everywhere in modern-day Britain.
What failing government wouldn’t want to have a grip on the media? The preponderance of right wing newspapers in the UK ought, surely, to be enough but apparently not.
Former editor of the toxic Daily Mail. Paul Dacre, grouse moor owner, is said to have been offered the role of heading up OfCom, the UK communications regulator!
Charles Moore for the BBC? He also has strong form on the grouse shooting issue. Of course, he has strong form on lots of things but his strong form is on the range of things that tend to go along with being on the right of Conservative politics and that’s where you find the supporters of grouse shooting and many of the grouse moor owners (see a small example of evidence for that from the readership of this very blog – click here).
I look forward to the day when Charles Moore calls in Chris Packham and congratulates him on his campaigning role outside of his BBC gigs and offers him a three-part series on why grouse shooting should be banned.
The BBC’s approach to rural issues was given a sharp jolt several years ago by a grouse moor owner, Heather Hancock, who is even now moving into her new role as Master of St John’s College Cambridge.
Boris Johnson? Grouse shooter. David Cameron? Grouse shooter. Rishi Sunak? Unknown form with a gun but a constituency packed with grouse moors and his response to constituents missed out a key paragraph used by other Tory MPs on heather burning (see here).
This government has been soft on wildlife crime on grouse moors, slow to regulate environmentally damaging heather burning on grouse moors, slow to extend bans on lead ammunition to grouse shooting and quick to exempt grouse shooting from the Rule of Six.
It was back in 1964, at election time, that Harold Wilson contrasted the Labour Party’s approach with that of the ‘grouse moor conception of national leadership’. Well over 50 years later we still haven’t moved on.
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This looks rather like history repeating itself. This is very much what Trump has been doing in the US and that is putting his very right wing cronies into top spots. Hopefully Trump will thrown out in November and that would knock away one of Johnson’s main allies..
I doubt that we will gain any changes for the better on DGS and the associated destruction of our wildlife and nature from the extreme right wing rabble that is the Westminster Government and it’s puppet organisation that is Natural England,
However if we keep raising the public profile of this destruction and the criminality that is part of DGS and campaign strongly with the provincial governments for the banning of DGS, who I think are much more reasonable, in the end the rabble in Westminster will either collapse or be forced to legislate strongly on DGS.
I’m going to disagree with you on this Dr Avery, I don’t think it is exclusively a rich mans sport.
Two years ago in February I was planting hedgerows, a mixture of berry-laden plants with a base structure of hawthorn, helping me was our woodsman. We were both up to our knees in Ypres mud it was bloody hard work for the both of us.
He caught me off-guard by saying.
“Tom, you’ll going to really hate me, but I’ve booked a couple of days grouse shooting in Yorkshire, I’ve never been, and always wanted to do it at least once in my life, I’ll probably not hit a thing but I want to experience it.”
Quite why he needed to confess is beyond me, probably because we were both knackered. I didn’t get judgmental in the slightest. All I said was that as it was something he’d wanted to do so why not do it?
Now he’s the other end of the scale from the usual stereotypical version of wealthy men dressed in tweed which people associate with grouse shooters, I’d love it if he changed his dress sense and dressed up in tweed certainly worth a picture for prosperity to hang up in the barn.
Would I say he’s a blue not on your nelly he’s as red as me.
And yes he’s still with us and a very vital cog in our rewilding wheel.
Thomas – I am going to agree partially with you – particularly as I had thought that I had changed that phrase with the addition of ‘mostly’ (but clearly not).
Interesting though your anecdote is I’m confident that the average income of paying customers at grouse shoots (and maybe even more so for non-payers) is higher than a matched sample off the street. Don’t you think so, too?
Did he go for a couple of days of walked up grouse shooting or driven grouse shooting?
Hi Tom, your chum “booked” it in or before February – on a serious driven grouse moor or a little amatuer syndicate affair? Or just made an informal arrangement with an Agent to be offered some should it become available? What price was he quoted and what did he end up paying – did he follow up with the details about the moor he shot at?
We ‘once in our lives’ had a meal at Le Manor aux Quat’Seasons.!
I know it’s Manoir, but predictive text, especially on Mark’s blog, changes words when your not looking!
…and Saisons!
It’s funny how when the Conservatives are in power down the years, they always seem to have their Ministers of Defence and other top jobs connected with MoD staffed by staunch shooting folk. It is to them an assurance of “soundness” of character, I gather.
Has this government stopped even pretending to be balanced and objective, and running the country for everyone?
Slipping into darkness…
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/sep/27/uk-schools-told-not-to-use-anti-capitalist-material-in-teaching
Is there a list anywhere of the main players in the driven-grouse industry, with their other business interests, and their influence on public life like this? Is there aren’t very many of them as you say, then it might help the fight against it by everyone being able to see where it’s tentacles reach. A mind map even.
“There really aren’t that many people involved in Grouse shooting”
For you to say something like that Mark I take it that you have numbers to back it up
I think he wrote a book all about that. You should buy a copy, or at least check it out of your local library [assuming that it wasn’t one of the ones shuttered due to the tory’s ideologically driven austerity cuts].
Well I guess it is possible to quibble over what constitutes ‘many people’ but you are not seriously trying to suggest that grouse shooting is anything other than a minority occupation? I would think that few grouse shooters would contest the fact that it is a somewhat exclusive activity and I daresay that many would welcome the fact.
I know that it is virtually a reflex for supporters of grouse shooting to challenge the veracity of any and every allegation made against the industry – however damning the evidence – but I really would have thought that it is mutually accepted by all sides that grouse shooting is not exactly a mass participation activity.
Senior grousers area bit like Old Etonians/Harrovians, masons or Mafiosa, they get to and their tentacles stretch through the corridors of power they need to reach yet they practise omerta, the silence and speak not of the things that link them all. Like all of these things it is by its very nature anti democratic and malign.
Grouse shooting is a legal sport, who participates in it is down to the choice of the individual, why should anybody think otherwise?
That’s very nice John. I am sure that you are right that whoever can stump up the cash can choose to go grouse shooting if they wish to. You are somewhat missing the point of the post though. The point is that that those who do actually choose to go shooting grouse and who can afford to do so include a lot of rather well-connected people who have the ear of ministers and the Prime Minister. It is hard not to make a connection between that and the Government’s longstanding failure to take meaningful action to curb the persistent and flagrant illegal behaviour associated with grouse shooting.
In my opinion, it is not a “sport” and, while it may be legal, it is enabled by outright criminality and environmentally damaging practices.
“Sport” is when both sides know they’re playing, with an equal chance of winning. If, perchance the grouse molesters were driven toward a line of guns by, a mob of hollering lickspittles waving flags then fired upon by a gang of drunken idiots, then their activity might loosely be defined as such.