Like an inebriated racegoer at Cheltenham last week, the Labour government seems desperate to pick a fight. Out of nowhere, it has launched a frontal attack on game shooting in the Land Use Framework published yesterday (18 March) by Defra. This seemingly innocuous document should have been focussed on resolving the serious question of competing demands on rural land from farming, energy production, nature recovery, recreation and many other uses, but Ministers could not help themselves from using it as a vehicle to denigrate game shooting and promote the licensing of all “recreational gamebird shooting and release”.
Have no doubt that this is a declaration of war on game shooting. This is exactly the agenda of the RSPB and other anti-shooting organisations and the current row over the licensing of the release of pheasants and partridges in and around sensitive environmental areas shows exactly why they are so keen to pursue this route.
In order to license something, you first have to prohibit it and then, when there is the slightest excuse, the withdrawal of licences implements a ban. Natural England is doing exactly this around a number of English Special Protection Areas (SPAs) at the moment using Avian Influenza as justification. The level of Defra’s ignorance of the realities of game shooting and the countryside is exposed by its suggestion that shoots are managed primarily for recreation in the same way as golf courses. There seems to be no awareness that game shooting is a complementary activity to agriculture, not a competitive one.
The evidence of the additional environmental and economic benefits that derive from game shooting on agricultural land is clear and it is exactly this sort of multiple land use that any sensible strategy should be encouraging. Instead, a government which is supposedly committed to growth is attacking one of the few growth industries in the rural economy which generates billions in income and employs tens of thousands of people.
This latest attack on game shooting adds to those the government has already launched on trail hunting and firearms licensing and completes the treble of issues the Alliance had warned Labour against getting involved in before the last election. It also completely negates any political benefit that might have come from the rollback on inheritance tax on agricultural property.
This new front is all the more depressing as it comes just two days after we joined over 20 rural Labour MPs from the Labour Rural Research Group in Westminster to launch a report on rural poverty, which the Alliance has supported. That was a serious event where a group of committed MPs promoted a range of policy recommendations which would make a real difference to the lives of their constituents in rural communities. I spoke about our work over years to focus Labour on real rural priorities and the vital importance for the government that it shows the countryside it really cares through actions that truly matter to rural people.
This latest foray into petty, ideological politics is a kick in the teeth to those rural MPs as well as those of us who have been promoting a serious rural agenda. I have long believed that relentless optimism is the only way to deal with modern politics, but even I am struggling to find positives to take out of the government’s current approach to the countryside. The route that Ministers have chosen will lead inevitably to conflict and they should be in no doubt that the last thing the Alliance and the rural community will do is lie down without a fight.
With direct threats to game shooting, hunting, gun ownership and wildlife management, the countryside is facing its greatest challenge for a generation.
The Alliance has the authority, experience and expertise to defend this way of life, but our work relies on your continued support - will you help us fund the fight?