Contribution
I have supported animal welfare since I was a teenager, when I first visited the Redwings horse sanctuary in Norfolk, where I learned about battery farming. At college, I set up an animal welfare group, and I used to work for an animal welfare charity. I care about the welfare of all animals and birds, including grouse.
I have no interest in shooting grouse. I believe—although some may challenge me on this—that I represent England’s largest grouse moors, in Teesdale and Weardale. I have never shot an animal in my life. I have shot a gun—during a short period in Canada, I greatly enjoyed target shooting—but I am not interested in grouse shooting. That does not mean we should ban it.
I am here as a Labour MP to represent my constituents. My first priority will always be the jobs and livelihoods of the people I represent. At a conservative estimate, 500 jobs in the Bishop Auckland constituency—in Teesdale and Weardale—rely on revenues from grouse shooting, including the gamekeepers, those who run gun shops, provide hospitality during shoots, maintain dry stone walls, look after the lodges and train dogs, and the young people for whom being a beater is a great way to earn a seasonal wage. I am here to speak for them. As the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), noted earlier, I really find it insulting when these people’s wages are talked about as “economically insignificant”. Others may consider it economically insignificant in the context of the national economy, but if someone is doing a job that their dad did before them and their grandfather did before him, if they grew up on that land and that is the job they want to do, their livelihood is not economically insignificant; it is what puts food on their table.
To talk about conservation, I recently had the pleasure of attending an event called Let’s Learn Moor with primary school children from my constituency. It was a wonderful day out, and I really enjoyed it. The children learned about the conservation of peat bogs, as well as all the various fantastic birds and wildlife that we have. Anyone can come to Teesdale and Weardale and see it for themselves; they will find no other place in the country where they can stand and within an hour observe curlews, lapwings and oystercatchers flying past. Those birds are there because they are preserved by predator control.
While I do not shoot grouse and never would, I have got up with friends at 4 am and gone out to the most remarkable and spectacular lek to see the black grouse that come together to the same spot every year to find their mate. We should be doing more to encourage eco-tourism in my part of the world, so that more people can enjoy the wonderful wildlife that we have because we live in a managed landscape.
At Let’s Learn Moor, the children met the Bishop Auckland fire brigade, who had come up to the top of the moor to demonstrate how they put out a moorland fire. They had a pump down in the river, and the children had a wonderful time spraying a firehose, which nearly hit us. I asked the firefighters about the method for managing and putting out moorland fires, and they said, “Well, the first thing we do is call the gamekeepers. They’re the experts at managing the fires, and they are normally first on the scene.” A local gamekeeper talked to me about his responsibility to manage not only predators but the land around him. He talked about his experiences moving on campers, including one occasion when he discovered people who had created a circle of stones and lit a fire; he moved them on to camp in a local pub’s garden.
To echo the point made by the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton about regulation, the gamekeepers also talked about how carefully they must tread when they come across foolish tourists who did not learn the countryside code in school. They told me, “If there is one allegation against us that we have been in any way aggressive, they will whip our guns away straightaway, because it is so tightly regulated.” They did not deny that there is occasional bad practice, and they were as disgusted as me by the criminality that sometimes occurs on the moorland, but the point is that it is criminality; we already have laws against such practices. Perhaps we need to look at how we enforce those laws; we do not necessarily need to create a whole new set.
Of course there are questions about how we manage the environment, and how we stop criminality and animal cruelty, but simply banning a sport that people have engaged in for generations will not solve those problems. It is vital that we keep the money flowing into our community. If we lost that revenue, we would lose jobs, and we would even lose primary schools, which would have to close. We are already seeing far too many families leaving the tops of the dales because of the lack of work. We would also lose the wildlife; it is not there by chance. With respect to those who signed the petition, and with a heartfelt understanding of their motives, I have to oppose it today.