Life of a Chalkstream: Why beavers would vote for Truss

Greetings!

I was completely baffled when, in the midst of that internecine war we call the Conservative Party leadership contest, Defra popped its head above the parapet last week to announce that beavers would be given the full protection of the law they currently do not have.

Why? It seemed an odd moment for George Eustice the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to move the legislation allowing for the change to come into force October 1. Later in the day, apparently completely unconnected, I happened to be listening to an interview on talk radio with Thérèse Coffey, a Minister over at Work and Pensions, who was being quizzed, very hard I must say, as to why she was supporting Liz Truss.

'Where did I put my Tory leadership ballot paper?'

Now Coffey always seems to me reasonable, sane and lucid but when it came to Truss she truly seemed lost for words babbling a few platitudes until she said, and this is in response to the question as to why Truss should be our next Prime Minster,

‘Liz was the first person to reintroduce beavers.’

If you think that is the oddest reason to support anyone for high office you are certainly not alone – the interviewer for one was incredulous and it caused much hilarity amongst later callers to the show. I must admit I had forgotten that Truss was a signed up beaverite and much of the mess we currently find ourselves in respect of these rodents dates back to her time at Defra 2014-16 when the department took a ‘light-touch’ approach to illegal releases.

As it turns out there has been a bit of grinding of reverse gears at Defra, with a counter announcement that the proposed legislation is now on hold because of other pressing parliamentary business ahead of the recess. However, a spokesman for Defra did say it is their intention to introduce the protection for beavers as required by our compliance to the Bern convention. Well, I’ve looked this up. It says,

‘The convention, adopted at Bern on 19 September 1979, aims to promote cooperation between the signatory countries in order to conserve wild flora and fauna and their natural habitats and to protect endangered migratory species.’

Beavers are not endangered, and they are only migratory in the sense that 15 years ago someone captured a breeding pair in eastern Europe, drove them 1500 miles, smuggled them across the Channel and then released them in Scotland, later doing the same favour for the West Country.

As to the Defra false start my guess is that someone (whoever might that be?!) thought that currying favour with Truss might be a good way of ensuring preferment should she become the next PM.

Should we trust the Wildlife Trusts?

There has a fair bit of chatter about a recent decision by Northampton Wildlife Trust to ‘ban’ fishing from all of its waters.

Now the simple fact is that the Trust owns the fishing waters at the Attenborough Nature Reserve, so they have a perfect right to grant a lease on whatever terms it wishes or not grant it at all. The Nottingham Angling Association, who rented the Attenborough waters, says the lease terms have become increasingly onerous in recent years, so they declined to renew. The Trust have now ended fishing for the next 12 months pending a review. However, since in a statement the Trust said “our long-standing policy, agreed by members, is against permitting angling on sites where we hold the rights” I think we can readily guess where that particular ‘review’ is heading.

As you might imagine I have had many dealings with wildlife trusts, the National Trust, government agencies and similar bodies over the years in respect of fishing rights both as a tenant and an agent. I’ll be honest, it is rarely a straightforward commercial transaction with all sorts of agendas, conflict of aims, bureaucracy and opaque decision making. I did raise a wry smile when someone interviewed by the Angling Times about the Attenborough Reserve furore said of a similar outcome for a pike fishing club, “The wildlife trust says it has an angling policy, but it’s more like an anti-angling policy.” Copy that.

However, I think the central tenet still remains that the owner, be it a Trust or a private individual, has the perfect right to lease land, fishing or property to whoever they wish. As anglers we don’t have any God-given right to rent.

But and it has to be a big but, a great many wildlife trusts and similar bodies only exist thanks to public funding, only able to purchase what they own by way of lottery grants and government (aka taxpayer) money that comes from many different sources. They would not, for a single moment, consider it legitimate to shut out bird watchers, ramblers, cyclists and those many other groups who choose to enjoy the great outdoors. Why should anglers be treated any differently?

Why indeed. Is there a hotbed of anti-angling sentiment within the wildlife trusts and similar bodies? I sort of suspect not with them or the public at large, as otherwise we would have seen the BBC series Mortimer & Whitehouse banned from our screens long ago. So, what is going on?

Well, to start with I am sure there are a small number of anti-angling activists who have undue influence on policy making, amping up the cruelty notions of fishing without ever mentioning that the fishing community have long been the unpaid and unsung custodians of our rivers. And then into the mix they add a bit of class warfare looking down on ‘white van’ coarse anglers and sneering at ‘posh’ fly fishers.

To me the answer is pretty clear. All grants and funding always come with a raft of conditions; the right to fish, whenever fair and reasonable, should be added to that list of conditions.

Feeling the heat? Not us!

As you all well know I have particular opinions reserved for both the Environment Agency (EA) and Natural England (NE) who purport to be the guardians of our countryside.

As you also know I do sometimes cut them some slack. They do, in the end, have masters in high places and those masters (and mistresses), the people we call government, have failed miserably to provide leadership going back countless decades.

But the EA and NE do themselves no favours even at the most basic level of carrying out simple duties. You’ll recall how during lockdown EA officers stayed at home rather than visit the sites of fish kills and would not fulfil their legal obligations to erect weed booms when the Covid risk of having two people in a rowboat was deemed too high.

Fast forward to the recent heatwave when we had scheduled, on the River Frome in Dorset, a weeklong habitat survey by a team of ecologists from Natural England. You can guess where this going - it was postponed on the Friday prior due to the ‘prospect of excessive temperature’.

I don’t know about you but of all the places I’d have liked to have been on those two or three days was beside a river. Plenty did. Our river keepers kept working. Our kids fish camp ran as planned. I know they weren’t technically on the river, but the builders next door kept jackhammering. The world did not have to stop.

Except, of course, if you were employed by Natural England. It was apparently beyond their wit to find some way of safeguarding a small team of men and women tasked with surveying 500m stretches of riverbank.

And do any of us for one moment imagine the NE ecologists were redeployed productively or that the contractors will not have to be paid twice? And that is before all of us river owners were messed about without a by-your-leave, consultation or apology. It really does make you despair.