Game shooting is bird conservation. This is not doublethink, this is a matter of fact that Sir Keir Starmer’s ministers seem determined to avoid. That this superficially eyebrow-raising statement is truthful was once again confirmed scientifically in a recently published paper on curlew populations that appeared in the journal Bird Study, featuring data collected by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. The paper shows that curlews, the enchanting troubadour of our moorlands and estuaries, are twice as successful on moorland managed by gamekeepers for shooting compared to unmanaged moorland.

Hopefully this finding comes as no surprise to long-time readers, but it appears that Defra are again content to pull the wool over their eyes when presented with this science. There has been no ministerial statement in response to this paper to correct the government’s previous statement on game shooting in March’s Land Use Framework which stated: “We know that recreational gamebird shooting can have trade-offs with environmental, economic and animal health and welfare outcomes. This can limit the ability of this land to delivery multiple benefits, including those for nature and climate resilience.”

We can draw from this statement that the government is capable of doublethink, Orwell’s term for the self-deception of simultaneously believing two opposite tenets. The believed contradiction in the government’s mind appears to be that the conservation of birds is bad for birds.

I don’t think it would be unfair, therefore, to accuse the Land Use Framework of being government policy based on absurdity and self-delusion. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that ideological preconceptions trump scientific findings in Keir Starmer’s Defra.

However, change is afoot in Whitehall. We should know by the end of today the date when the messianic Andy Burnham will be marshalling the removal men into 10 Downing Street. Change in Downing Street will likely lead to change in Marsham Street, the home of Defra.

If Andy Burnham is serious in his criticism of the “Westminster bubble”, then he would do well to engender that ethos in Defra. Fittingly, Defra is responsible for the land that is as far from Westminster as you can find.

The next Environment Secretary has an opportunity that they would do well not to squander, an opportunity to reset the relationship between the government and the countryside, a relationship that has been battered, bruised and bloodied over the past two years. They will have the chance to make good on Labour’s manifesto pledge to “promote biodiversity and protect our landscapes and wildlife”.

There are some valuable lessons that can be learned from this curlew study; the next Environment Secretary, along with their junior ministers, needs to be asking how they can enhance, enable and spread the invaluable work that gamekeepers do to improve biodiversity in Britain. They could start by ensuring that gamekeepers are not hampered in their work through politically motivated legislation that will stop them from managing habitats and predation pressures. They could rewrite the Land Use Framework to acknowledge the huge positive impacts of game shooting, that go hand in hand with farming. They could drop ideas to bring in licensing of game shooting, after all, it is clear from all this evidence that the current level of regulation is resulting in fantastic conservation outcomes that we should all celebrate.