BBC TV presenter bashes Barclays at anti-grouse-shoot protest

by Charlie Jacoby

Chris Packham really doesn’t like UK bank Barclays. 

“If anyone here is banking with Barclays, then I suggest you stick your head in a bucket of fuel and set fire to it,” he told a crowd, “because you’re burning our planet down and it’s time to put this stuff behind us.”

The BBC TV presenter made his feelings known at a recent animal rights demo. Formerly Hen Harrier Day, now called Action for Wildlife Day, the 2024 event took place at Carsington Water, Derbyshire.

Now widened out to include Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, Action for Wildlife Day 2024 saw Wild Justice founders  Chris Packham, Mark Avery and Ruth Tingay take to a stage to complain about grouseshooting to a small audience.

As well as calls to sign a new petition to ban grouseshooting (the last two failed in Westminster parliamentary debates), Packham asked his supporters to sign the petition to release five Just Stop Oil protestors. The petition calls for ‘the immediate end to the imprisonment of brave, nonviolent political prisoners, jailed for telling the truth and acting in resistance to continued extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal’.

Packham said on stage: “Unless we retain that right for peaceful protest as part of our portfolio that we need for change, then I think we’re in deep trouble.”

Organisers gave space to the Protect the Wild group, which is launching what it calls a ‘TripAdvisor’ for antis – an online list of UK businesses that they believe support hunting and shooting.

“Our site is going to be a mix of TripAdvisor and ethical consumer so that every time, if you are going somewhere and you want to know that the pub or the hotel you’re about to go to, or the village store, or you’ve got a wedding and you want to check whether the photographer you’re about to hire is connected with hunting and shooting, one day they will be on our site,” PTW’s Charlie Moores told the audience.

The most outrageous statement of the day came from Packham, who called out customers of Barclays, and told them to kill themselves.

It has been a tough few years for Wild Justice. It hasn’t had a major success since its legal action against the government over general licences in 2019. Convictions for raptor persecution are at historic lows and, thanks to the government’s brood management scheme, run as a partnership between grousekeepers and Natural England without the help of the RSPB, hen harrier numbers are on the up.

The Wild Justice faithful turned up at Carsington Water, where the RSPB manages the nature reserve, and cheered as RSPB vice-president Packham and his group threatened conservation, wildlife management and the rule of law.