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Tim Bonner: Packham’s self-defeating grouse petition

The series of parliamentary petitions supporting a ban on grouse shooting created by Chris Packham and his colleagues at the pretentiously named Wild Justice must go down as one of the most self-defeating tactics of all time. So far, they have achieved two parliamentary debates at which MPs lined up to send out a resounding message about the environmental, economic and social benefits of grouse shooting and, last week, a ringing endorsement of grouse shooting from the new Labour government.

 

Rishi Sunak makes the case for grouse shooting in Westminster debate.

 

In response to the latest petition reaching 10,000 clicks after months of promotion, Defra said: “The Government has no plans to ban driven grouse shooting. It recognises well-managed grouse shooting can be an important part of a local rural economy, providing direct and indirect employment” and added “the Government considers that well-managed shooting activities can bring benefits to the rural economy and can be beneficial for wildlife and habitat conservation. We will continue work to ensure a sustainable, mutually beneficial relationship between shooting and conservation”. 

 

As well as provoking a particularly puerile reaction from Wild Justice, this response has also emphasised how far the Labour party has travelled on many rural issues and game shooting in particular. In 2019 Labour fought the General Election on a manifesto with commitments to consult on banning grouse shooting and to restrict game farming. By 2024, however, any pledges relating to shooting had been removed from Labour’s programme with the exception of a strange commitment to “ban snare traps”.

 

This change of approach did not happen by accident. The conservation value of grouse moor management and game shooting more widely, as well as their importance to rural communities, had been consistently promoted by the Alliance and our partner organisations. Alongside that the Alliance had argued that a significant part of ‘Labour’s rural problem’, as one of its MPs had christened it, was an obsession with narrow politically motivated attacks of little relevance to the broad body of rural voters. In opposition Keir Starmer and his shadow Ministers seemed to understand that. Indeed Luke Pollard, the then shadow Defra Secretary, wrote that the Countryside Alliance had “told an honest story about how Labour had retreated from rural communities”.

 

This makes the current impasse between the government and the countryside over inheritance tax and agricultural property relief all the more frustrating. All the work that the Prime Minister and the Labour party did in opposition to detoxify its brand in the countryside, and sensible responses to campaigns like the one to ban grouse shooting now it is in government, continue to be overshadowed by one disastrous decision by the treasury. This week a series of supermarkets from Morrisons to Tesco have come out publicly against the family farm tax and it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who actually supports it. This is becoming a serious political challenge for the government. Only by amending its policy on inheritance tax will it allow its sensible approach on other rural issues to be properly heard.

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