Dear Andy I hope you are well. I’ll be coming to parliament a week today on a rally organised by the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts and the League Against Cruel Sports, and supported by some other countryside organisations too. If you are around and could spare a few moments to talk then I’d be very…
Category: CAMPAIGNING: petitions, marches, writing to your MP, HHDay
Hen Harrier Day 2+
If you can, then save the date of 9 December for a rally of the Westminster parliament by nature conservationists. An event, organised by the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts and the League Against Cruel Sports (the first time these organisations have worked together in this way?) will be held on the 9 December – the…
19000 signatures – thank you.
Another milestone passed – our (for there are 18,999 of you and only one of me) e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting today passed the 19,000 signature mark. I would like to thank all who have signed and all who have promoted this e-petition. This latest 1000 has taken just under a month to achieve…
Letter to my MP
To Andy Sawford MP Dear Andy I hope this finds you well. I am writing to enlist your support in getting some information out of Defra – in fact, I wonder whether you could check whether anyone is at home in that department. I have made several FOI requests to Defra via my…
Plenty of life in e-petition 65627
I just happened to make a note a couple of weeks ago of the number of signatures attached to our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting and the e-petition for the non-joint non-plan. Ours stood at 17,608 signatures whereas the GWCT effort was at 10,414. Now, we were off the mark a while before the…
LUSH customers sign 20,000 Hen Harrier cards
LUSH stores spent a week featuring the plight of the Hen Harrier back in August. I was really impressed when I went into several stores to talk to the staff, starting with Martyn and Joe in Northampton and Amy, Grace, Helena, Hayley and Dave in Peterborough. My office still has the aroma of bath-bombs in…
Government response to e-petition 65627
Our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting passed the 10,000 signature mark on 31 July and received a response after nearly five weeks of brow-wrinkling thought on behalf of Defra on 1 September (maybe they thought I’d be touched by it appearing on the centenary of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon). The sections in…
E-petition passes 16,000 signatures – where is Defra’s response?
A little while before midday yesterday our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting passed the 16,000 signature mark. Thank you to all who have signed it already. This is already, inside three months, the 9th most-signed e-petition aimed at Defra. And there are another seven months to go (there would be nine if it weren’t…
Guest poem – The Blood and the Purple (to mark Hen Harrier Day) by John Smart
I and a colleague, who does much work for the Essex Wildlife Trust, attended the ‘Hen Harrier Day’ protest event on Sunday, at Derwent Water in the Peak District. It was heartening to mingle with so many like-minded folk who are appalled at the persecution of raptors across the grouse moors. And even more dismayed…
Hen Harrier Day – some ‘thank you’s
I was thanked a lot on Saturday, Sunday and subsequently for organising the Hen Harrier Day event in the Peak District. It really didn’t take much organising – it took a bit of nerve though! Here is a run-through of the roles of organisations and individuals in making Hen Harrier Day happen. Some people’s roles…