Monday 1 August 2016

Political Scrapping

Conservation and land management are seriously political activities. Being so a lot of money goes into the warfare between contending parties not to mention in-fighting and backstabbing among those who are supposed to be on the same side. Diplomacy occasionally makes an appearance but soon gets derailed by the scuffles, the misinformation and the fog of war.

Already mentioned has been the petition from Mark Avery against driven grouse shooting and the letter to Marks and Spencer from Chris Packham.

No single interest group is better resourced than the grouse shooting industry, well linked as it is to the old money of landed gentry and the new money of the London business and financial sectors. Its expertise and its energies are well known, an education to anyone wishing to understand the British establishment. They lobby like nobody else, are impeccably 'well-connected' and know just how to wield influence. While they prefer to remain in the background, when a major issue surfaces in relation to game shooting they move swiftly to discredit their critics and flood the media with press releases littered with phony statistics and dodgy claims; truth is of no importance beside the power to get your message across to the right people.  When we listen to them we may soon find ourselves believing the UK is the envy of the world and incredibly lucky to have such enlightened and saintly landowners. They also are proof that their propaganda scores well with many of the sub-species who troll in social media as seen below Chris Packhams's Youtube video.

Tactics used by the grouse shooting lobby are sophisticated and include making themselves look bigger than they really are and disguising themselves in identical clothing to their opponents. One way they do this is by setting up multiple pressure groups. So the GWCT (Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust) has, I'm convinced, a membership composed of largely the same people as the BASC (British Association for Shooting and Conservation) and the Heather Trust and the Moorland Association; and all share membership with the Countryside Alliance. But the aim is to speak as separate entities in lobbying governments and government agencies thus appearing to represent an overwhelming rural voice. It's easy to see: "We, the So and So Association represent x thousand members and we think thus ....." and at the same time "We the Such and Such Trust" have y thousand members and ... etc." Yet how many members are common to both and others lobbying for the same thing?

The RSPB with an enormous membership has recently been engaging with these other interests, mostly shooters, in an effort to get some kind of compromise agreement. The RSPB has now withdrawn, realising there's no progress to be made with these groups.

It would perhaps be easier for the RSPB to put across a consistent case against  the excesses of the shooting interests if it did not itself shoot foxes and other entirely natural predators.


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