Dear Mr Reed,
Many congratulations from the Squires on your new role as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
No doubt for the last weeks and months you have had all sorts attempt to curry favour, from farming lobbyists to Croydon’s animal rights terrorists (if you want the latest list, please feel free to get in touch), from moorland reps to ‘Stale Mince’ in his greasy keffiyeh selflessly returning government subsidies in the form of party donations. The most overt brownnosing seems to have come from that great chum of our magazine, Christopher Gary Packham, the climate extinctionist and Just Stop Oil/ER/Animal Rising fanboy, whose activist group Wild Justice has recently decided, perhaps in a bid to seem to have moved from the fringes into the mainstream, that the scattergun rewilding approach they once promoted is actually failing.
Here, offered humbly, are our pointers for you over the next few years:
- ‘Research’ in this space often means nowt. Peer reviews and ‘evidence-based’ reports tend to be put together by paid researchers and academics, often with glaring vested interests. To take an example look at the nonsense ‘scientists’ talk about lead shot.
- Avoid the subjective. Seek out the facts on the ground by talking directly with farmers, gamekeepers, conservationists, landowners and those actually working the land. FPTP has given you enough of a majority to be tough and fair.
- Ignore the fur baby crowd. Sometimes ‘cruel to be kind’ is the best way even though the polls, and even sometimes your heart, tell you otherwise.
- Ignore the polls. They get skewed by bad actors. When you see a poll from PETA, LACS or other loopy-loops, imagine those nanas at home knitting Shreddies, one after the other. We kid you not, some of the old dears, sometimes paid by the animal rights shower, send off thousands of letters a week.
- Worst of the bad actors: Wild Justice, Eduardo ‘Spanish Lynx’ Goncalves (his Mirror articles are hilarious, although he rarely takes the byline), LACS (footage fakers), elements of the RSPB, the criminal Luke Steele, ex-ex-ex PM’s wife (truly dreadful), well-meaning wolf-loving Tory billionaires, Guy Ilyich Shrubsole, the anti-Semitic/animal rights crossover (CST will give you a steer) and anything or anyone sab-related. We’d mention that badger muppet Dominic Dyer but that would be harsh given he’s just been publicly humiliated in Buckingham and Bletchley as one of the worst-performing Lib Dem candidates ever.
- Do sit down with No Farmers No Food. Getting onside with them as, to his credit, Sunak did is worth it. This will avoid major farmer flare-ups. In the autumn we were not far off M25 blockages.
- Avoid the climate extinctionists, badger nuts and other extremists – working with them will rile the whole countryside, which is already a tinder box.
- Proscribe the sabs. We can’t have balaclava-wearing terrorists threatening kids on pony rides every weekend. They spit, thump and terrorise – end them and fine those who finance them.
- Seek to regulate the carbon credit market. It’s a huge scandal already blowing up with bodies you will work with implicated (up to their necks in it, sad to say).
- Natural England is a really good idea. Try and fix it.
- Create a couple of posts at the Charity Commission investigation unit in Liverpool for animal rights scam investigators. The amount of ‘Go Fraud Me’ scams – targeting vulnerable people by enraging them with footage of animal cruelty – is on the up and is simply not on, as we Squires have pointed out repeatedly for years.
- Before writing off country sports, go spend some time on the moors, with your leader’s gamekeeper ancestors and with estate managers to see the situation from their perspective, especially in Scotland.
- Finally, read Dear Townies to understand the intricacies and true nature of countrysider ire.
Very best of luck in your new job, Mr Reed.
Yours sincerely,
The Squires