Grousing about flooding

Countryside Alliance Chief Executive Tim Bonner writes: It never ceases to amaze me how determined extreme animal rights and environmental activists can be once they have locked onto the target of their displeasure, but even by their standards the claims that recent floods were caused by grouse shooting is exceptionally creative. There is, of course, the slight difficulty that the vast majority of flooding happened in areas where the only grouse present are on bottles of whisky, but even where there are grouse moors the idea that they are contributing towards flooding is at best unproven and at worst mischievous.

The facts are that the drainage of heather moorland with open drains, or grips, was once widespread in the uplands and in the 1960s and 70s successive governments offered upland farmers and landowners grants for draining their land to increase agricultural productivity, not numbers of red grouse. However, research undertaken in the 1980s and 90s found that drains continued to erode over time and that doing so could also help restore natural drainage patterns, so government policy changed to encourage the blocking of such drains. In the North Pennines alone, more than 2,700 miles of moorland drainage ditches have now been blocked by grouse moor managers, and some 300 acres of bare peat have been revegetated.

None of this is of interest to the anti-shooting lobby, however, which remains fixated on the image of grouse moors as the playground of the tweeded aristocracy and hedge funders. Worryingly, senior Labour politicians are increasingly adopting the language of these extremists with one shadow Minister even calling for a 'ban on driven grouse shooting'.

Rural England, with very few exceptions, is now a one party state. This is not a healthy situation for democracy. Reports that the recent surge in Labour party membership is almost exclusively urban and that the party is doing less well when it comes to attracting rural dwellers are further cause for concern. If the Labour party is to re-engage with rural Britain and to again be able to claim, as it did after the 1997 election, to be the party of the countryside it will not succeed through this sort of divisive politics.

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