Shooters, farmers and other country people are planning a London March on Saturday 29 June 2019. It starts at 11am at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, and heads for Westminster. Here is one of the organisers explaining it:
Called The Countryside Rally 2019, its main method of communication to protestors is Facebook.
The UK’s countryside is beautiful. That’s no accident. Leave the people who live in it to keep looking after it, as we have for thousands of years. That’s the message coming out of a group organising a rally in London in June.
Following the recent general licences debacle by Natural England, they feel like they are being booted out of their own fields and forests, disenfranchised, that city people want to take management of the countryside away from the people who live there.
In an age of consensus, they see an animal rights activist elite imposing their ideas, worked up in Islington and Notting Hill restaurants, on a living, breathing landscape that’s already well tended by country people.
Whether it’s banning pest control or hunting, forcing ‘rewilding’, or villifying and criminalising farmers, gamekeepers and hunt staff, there’s a widening gap between what works for the countryside and what sounds like a good idea in The Guardian.
Their message: keep your quangos and your factfinding trips if you want to, but trust us to look after the UK’s countryside for you.
Feeliung in the countryside is strong. Here is a pigeon shooter explaining why he is going to the rally: