Tuesday 3 August 2010

Defra wants shooters' help

Here's a special message from Caroline Spelman, for BASC members. She wants our help to develop government policy on the natural environment:


I'd be more impressed if she hadn't filmed multiple versions of the same message, for members of RSPB, WWF, National Trust, NFU, Wildlife Trusts, Uncle Tom Cobley and all - but it's a start!

If you have a view on what government should be doing about the environment - well, they've asked the question, you've only yourself to blame if you don't tell 'em what you think.

2 comments:

Sooty said...

My wish would be that the above groups could come to a understanding that they could agree on lots of things and instead of it coming over from each group talking about the other groups lumping people in them as all bad they accepted that the majority were O K and some bad eggs amongst them,my feeling is that would stop most of the bad feeling.

James Marchington said...

So true Sooty. The funny thing is, each organisation would say something like that about each other one; very often it's the grassroots members whose perceptions are polarised.

It's a very human trait to judge books by their covers - and there are good evolutionary reasons why we do so. The mistake is allowing these shallow, emotional judgements to drive legislation.

So what are we going to tell Defra, other than 'go boil yer heid'?

I'd favour a bonfire of red tape - perhaps some sort of threshold size for farms, abbatoirs, farm shops, etc, etc, below which the burden of bureaucracy was dramatically cut. If nothing else, it would mean a lot of diesel (and stress) saved in transporting animals miles to slaughter.

Encourage small, mixed holdings to thrive, and many environmental benefits would flow automatically. A cheap option too, at a time when everyone thinks their special interest is too important to suffer cuts.