If You Actually Like Birds, Let Gamekeepers Manage Them – Not the RSPB

Whitehall’s plan to seize control of shooting estates would accelerate the destruction of the countryside

Prime Minister, did you think we would not notice? On Tuesday, you grandly promised Parliament that you would devolve power to “all parts of England” as part of your “rewiring of the British state”.

But three days later, Defra is seizing more power from the countryside. Are you a hypocrite? Or are you not in control of Defra?

What I am talking about is Defra’s plan to allow itself to close down shooting estates. The evidence-gathering exercise it launched on Friday is the department’s first step towards the introduction of licences for pheasant, partridge and grouse shoots, which would mean officials could shut them down on a whim without any court process.

Imagine a faceless bureaucrat, working from home, deciding to end your career without any of the fairness that our legal system requires. Prime Minister, that is not devolution, that is tin-pot dictatorship.

If this plan upsets you, drop a quick email to your MP before you read the rest of this article. Politely request that they ask the Prime Minister whether, in the past three days, he has changed his mind on devolution.

Now some folk have higher priorities than fairness to other people. Some put animals first. I like vegans. They are principled. And into self-denial, if a bit nutty in pretending that they are not part of a natural world in which everything eats everything.

But vegans are consistent. They eat no meat, no chicken, no fish. Nor do they indulge in any dairy product exploitation. And obviously, no leather shoes. They simply wear clothes made of fossil fuels instead. Vegans are saints.

However, it is difficult to sympathise with those meat-eaters who hate game shooting. They are specialists in inconsistency. They eat chicken! Not perfect, they would admit. And many would argue that they only eat “free-range” birds.

Do they not realise these chickens are kept at up to 13 birds per square metre? Compare that cramped eight-week life from egg to plate with the grouse I shoot and eat. Never caged, these birds spend on average two years flying free around the countryside. So, it is the chicken-eating, game-shooting haters who are immoral.

Many activists inwardly know they are being illogical. That is why they scream abuse at those they disagree with. Others work for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

And it is this vast money-making machine that has its hand up Defra’s glove. The RSPB’s leadership has pushed relentlessly to have game shooting run by officials rather than overseen by the courts, because the courts have repeatedly rebuffed the RSPB.

If the common activists are trying to cover up their personal hypocrisy, what is the motivation of the RSPB bigwigs?

It is envy. RSPB raw data I obtained this week show that black grouse numbers on RSPB-managed land have fallen 38 per cent in recent years, with the number of grey partridge, golden plover, snipe, curlew and lapwing also dropping. At its Dove Stone reserve, the population of ring ouzel is at its “lowest ever” level.

Meanwhile on moors run by gamekeepers, black grouse numbers are up 61 per cent on last year. The keepers have had spectacular results across key species, with the British Trust for Ornithology reporting a 37 per cent increase in curlews on keepered Peak District moors. And that is at a time when the species had collapsed nationally.

Is the RSPB’s accelerating failure because it has run out of money? Far from it. In the last year its income surged 15 per cent to £195m. So, given the RSPB’s plummeting bird numbers, what are its members getting in return? Well, quite a bit of political lobbying. And rewilding.

Rewilding has long been the RSPB’s big idea for managing its reserves, and the results arrived this year in the form of major wildfires on three of its reserves. Strange, that.

During an era of hotter summers, you allow vegetation to grow unmanaged and dry out, before it suddenly bursts into flames. The RSPB makes money and turns it into tinder.

Defra has a legal duty to protect endangered species. So it might want to ask how the RSPB is helping. If you personally want to help birds, you would do better giving your money to your local grouse moor rather than the RSPB. Pity the poor ground-nesting birds which accidentally fly into RSPB reserves. If the foxes don’t get them, the flames will.

Whitehall’s obsession with rewilding is not the only slow-motion disaster for the countryside. The ratchet effect of constant Defra regulation is strangling rural businesses.

Fewer farmers and fewer gamekeepers mean there are fewer people watching over our land and able to put out the wildfires created by rewilding. It is these men and women who are the backbone of our on-call fire stations. In the last decade alone part-time firefighter numbers have fallen 26 per cent, from 10,602 to 7,860.

This is bad news for cities as well. Defra’s ongoing ban on the winter burning of excess vegetation means that our peatlands will be even more at risk next year. When they catch fire the smoke can pour down the valleys for months.

That smoke may pour on to places like Manchester. Two days after I wrote in The Telegraph urging the Prime Minister to take charge of wildfires he sent out that panic alert on our phones.

If he does not reverse Whitehall’s power grabs across the North’s countryside he won’t just be called a devolution hypocrite. People will blame him for the loss of jobs, of nature and, I fear, of lives as well.

This article originally appeared in The Telegraph.