If anyone ever tells you that it is easy to get 100,000 signatures for a petition then ask them how many times they have done it. Very few people have. I have – five times and I have given considerable help and advice to others too.
I’m a fan of the idea that any citizen can start a petition, on any subject on which parliament has control, and if they get 99,999 others to put their names to it then the petition will almost certainly be debated in the Westminster parliament. There is no promise that it will be debated well or that the debate will make a rapid difference to the world but there is that possibility. Parliament is not over-taxed with successful petitions as 18 have so far been debated in this parliament out of the 6500+ which have been submitted. Only 125+ petitions have passed the 10,000 signature mark and (so far) have received a government response.
Here I make three points about the conduct of the debate last week.
Mr Lamont’s introduction of the petition: Mr Lamont (Con, Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) is a member of the Petitions Committee and was chosen (how, I wonder? Maybe he was an eager volunteer?) to introduce the debate. I met Mr Lamont online with Wild Justice folk for a 30 minute chat a few days before the debate.
Mr Lamont realised that he had to “present the petition reasonably and fairly” in his role as a member of the Petitions Committee and you can judge for yourself whether he did – click here. You may think I am too sensitive when I feel that “I do not doubt the petitioners’ sincere and good intentions, but I note that, regrettably, there is often a great deal of misinformation surrounding grouse shooting. Having spoken to many organisations that hold different views, and having canvassed a wide range of opinions, I am pleased to have the opportunity to set the record straight by sharing the realities of grouse shooting.”, “the position of activists in favour of a ban is fundamentally flawed“, and “That is why, despite what a small number of activists would like to do, I oppose a ban on this crucial sector.” are not appropriate statements to be made by whichever member of the Petitions Committee is selected (I wonder how) to set the scene for the overall debate. Mr Lamont appears to have forgotten that this petition was being debated not because a small number of activists had forced their way into the Palace of Westminster with their crazy ideas but because 100,000 citizens had signed a petition on this matter and deserved far better treatment from a member of the Petitions Committee than they got. I do not regard Mr Lamont’s remarks as reasonable or fair or even meeting the standards of acceptable politeness for a member of the Petitions Committee carrying out a task of introducing a subject for debate. Mr Lamont, you can have any views you want on grouse shooting, and if you had come to this debate as an ordinary MP then you could read out a BASC and Countryside Alliance briefing, but you let yourself down in the way you introduced this subject for debate and you will have been seen to do so by those (like me) watching online, or the few members of the public allowed in the chamber and by those who read the transcript of your remarks.
The 75% heather falsehood: this is a small matter about the truth. Supporters of grouse shooting keep rolling out statements along the lines of ‘75% of the world’s heather moorland is found in the UK’ although this isn’t true – click here. It’s not an important fact (which is just as well because it isn’t a fact) but it acts as a very clear marker that the speaker or writer is a supporter of driven grouse shooting. You will find BASC using this figure all over the place and there are leaflets and banners with those words on them -despite them not being true.
And so it was shocking to see the Defra response to the petition using that same figure. Wild Justice reacted immediately to it and wrote to the Petitions Committee – click here – seeking a change to the Defra response (Wild Justice has achieved such changes in the past). Wild Justice was told this would be looked into.
The government response remained unchanged for the remaining four months of the petition which is unacceptable. Defra should have corrected its error and the Petitions Committee should be policing such statements when alerted to errors – previous committees have done so.
Seven MPs trotted this figure out in the debate which would not have happened (I guess) if the Petitions Committee had required Defra to revise its statement. This is how falsehoods are perpetuated; it’s when those with the power to correct them do nothing.
Conflicts of interest: the revelation that Sam Rushworth MP spoke in favour of grouse shooting without declaring in the debate that his campaign received a very generous, and no doubt entirely philanthropic, donation of £10,000 from the North Pennines Moorland Group in 2023 draws attention to this matter. This is, by a factor of two, the largest donation in Mr Rushworth’s registered interests – click here. If the donor to Mr Rushworth named Gary Lubner is this – click here – Gary Lubner then the millionaire philanthropist may be thrilled to see that a bunch of grouse shooters are co-donors and might just wonder whether a sport of killing birds for fun, which is underpinnned by wildlife crime and which causes environmental damage is a progressive cause.
The general point is that MPs should be open about their interests and their donors and err towards being overly open about any sources of funding that could be perceived to have influenced their statements as MPs. I perceive, rightly or wrongly, that the £10,000 might have influenced Mr Rushworth. How many other MPs have undeclared interests? How many MPs speaking in favour of grouse shooting have links, perhaps even financial links, to BASC or the Countryside Alliance? Would we have been told?
I feel that standards in public life are dropping regularly and that the Petitions Committee should look at how its debates measure up to proper standards. Why would the public, the electorate, think highly of a process where a member of a committee has the obligation to introduce a subject fairly and then spends 90% of their time slagging off one side of the debate? Why should they respect a process where the same committee was alerted to an error of fact in a government response to a petition and yet (apparently) did nothing to correct it? Why should we approve of a process which allows an MP to speak in favour of one side of a debate without mentioning that he had received his largest donation from the supporters of the debate which he was supporting? I don’t think these things would have happened at the beginning of the life of these parliamentary petitions. It may be that some in parliament have forgotten their obligations to truth, to the electorate and to common decency.
[registration_form]
A further bit of sleight of hand that often accompanies the 75% figure is the notion that the habitat is ‘scarcer than tropical rainforest’ and by implication of even greater ecological importance. The importance of rainforest, of course does not lie in its scarcity – there are vast expanses of it – but in its ecological richness and its critical role in supporting climate stability (and, sadly the rate of loss). It is a nonsense to suggest that British grouse moors come anywhere close to this importance and a further nonsense to suggest that the management practices on grouse moors somehow make it more important than rainforest when they actually simplify the biodiversity and accelerate carbon emissions from the habitat. Nevertheless, shooting organisations persist with the spurious comparison, duping gullible MPs into the belief that the amusement of a tiny section of the population is some kind of ecological and economic miracle that brings riches of every kind to the British uplands.