BY GARY BAXTER
As I sit here watching another bloody red kite circle over what’s left of the local songbirds, I decide to have a look at what fresh hell the pen-pushers in their air-conditioned offices have dreamt up for us this week. And Christ on a bike, it doesn’t take long to find it. Everywhere you look, it’s another scheme conjured by some millennial graduate with a degree in environmental studies and not a single day of actual land management under their belt.
It seems the three-ring circus of Natural England, Defra, and their band of merry idiots are determined to finish the job of turning the British countryside into a woke, unmanaged, predator-infested theme park.
Let’s start with the gamebird licence farce. BASC are right – the system is “ecologically incoherent”. That’s a polite way of saying it’s a total clusterfuck dreamt up by people who’ve never had to make a living from the land. Natural England, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that because of bird flu – which has been around since God was a boy – they’ll scrap the general licence. Now every keeper, every estate, has to beg for an individual one.
And the kicker? The arrogant sods at NE REFUSE TO HAND OVER THE BLOODY DATA needed to make the applications! It’s like asking a man to navigate a minefield but refusing to tell him where the mines are. This isn’t conservation; it’s obstruction. It’s economic vandalism against rural communities, all to appease the Marxist anti-shooting brigade and Fabian Society townies. It’s a bloody disgrace.
But why stop there? Oh no. While they’re busy tying the hands of the very people who actually look after the countryside, Tony Juniper over at NE is getting all misty-eyed about releasing LYNX. Yes, you read that right. Great big bloody cats. He’d be “absolutely delighted” to see it happen on his watch. Well, I’m sure the sheep farmers of Northumberland will be absolutely delighted too when their lambs start getting taken by a predator that hasn’t been here since the middle ages!
This Lynx UK Trust mob reckon it’s a “no-brainer”. They’re right – you’d have to have no brain to think it’s a good idea! They say it’ll boost tourism. What, for the six people who might actually see the elusive buggers? Meanwhile, every farmer will be living in fear. And don’t give me that tripe about them only eating deer. A lamb is an easy meal, you fools! They talk about Europe. Well, this isn’t Belgium. This is a small, crowded island where the countryside is already on its knees. The last thing we need is another apex predator to finish the job!
And as if that wasn’t enough proof that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, Defra has decided to extend the muirburn ban. Because, of course, the best way to prevent catastrophic wildfires is to BAN the controlled, professional method of preventing the build-up of fuel that feeds them! It’s genius! Have these people not seen the news? The great black plumes of smoke from summer wildfires that burn for weeks, pumping God-knows-what into the air and roasting every living thing in the soil? That’s what happens when you don’t manage the land!
But no, Minister Mary Creagh reckons our peatlands are “England’s Amazon”. Well, love, you’re managing them about as well as the Brazilians are managing theirs! You’re letting them burn to a cinder! They’re banning the preventative medicine and forcing us to rely on the emergency surgery that never comes in time.
They want to replace burning with cutting? Fine. Go and stand on a moor after it’s been cut. It’s a tinderbox of dry, dead heather lying on the surface – kindling waiting for a spark. But I’m sure a bureaucrat with a clipboard knows better than generations of keepers and farmers.
Nearest Mary Creagh gets is that dog toilet of a park in her Coventry constituency.
It’s all one great big bloody game to them, isn’t it? A game played with other people’s livelihoods, other people’s traditions, and the very future of our landscape. They sit in their meetings, wear their posh anoraks, and talk about “engagement” and “stakeholders” while the countryside gets pillaged by predators and choked by wildfires.
They’ve forgotten the golden rule: YOU NEED FARMERS AND KEEPERS. They are the original conservationists. They are not the enemy.
This isn’t conservation. It’s vanity. It’s ideology. And it’s going to end in tears.
Pass me the Scotch. A double.
Bring on the blue coalition and put these vandals in the clink (in a different jail to all their rent boys).
Gary Baxter is the son of a gamekeeper, is an ex gamekeeper and has run his own falconry based bird control business for the last 20 years.