Year: 2021

A couple of days ago I wrote a blog about whether the Countryside Alliance’s position as a member of the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG) should be reviewed following the judge’s summary comments during the sentencing of huntsman Mark Hankinson, who had been convicted of encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence during a series of private webinars last year (see here).

The judge, Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram, had intimated in his summing up that the webinar contributions of former Chief Inspector Phil Davies and his references to ‘smoke screens’ and ‘creating elements of doubt’ [in my view, in order for hunting personnel to avoid potential prosecution] were questionable at best, although Mr Davies was neither charged or prosecuted.

Mr Davies is a member of the RPPDG as the Countryside Alliance’s representative.

Since I wrote that blog, more detail has emerged that further increases the justification for reviewing Mr Davies’ position on the RPPDG.

In an exclusive article published today by iNews, it is claimed that the police are ‘furious’ that only Mark Hankinson was prosecuted, because they wanted to see all six webinar contributors face prosecution but the CPS said there was insufficient evidence to proceed.

The article goes on to claim that The League Against Cruel Sports, which was the official complainant in the action, called on the CPS to reopen cases against Lord Mancroft and others involved in the meetings, including Mr Davies.

Whether there was or wasn’t sufficient evidence to prosecute all six, the fact is that Mr Davies’ participated in a webinar that covered the illegal persecution of wildlife, resulting in a conviction for Hankinson, and there hasn’t been any indication that Mr Davies, or any of the other contributors for that matter, challenged Hankinson’s criminal briefing at the time it was delivered. That may be insufficient evidence to prosecute but it does absolutely nothing for public confidence. In my view, Mr Davies’ continued involvement as a member of the RPPDG is no longer tenable on that basis alone.

Here is a copy of the iNews article:

Police officers behind the conviction of a leading figure in the fox hunting lobby have told i they are “furious” that a member of the House of Lords was not prosecuted.

Lord Mancroft, one of 92 hereditary peers who remain in the upper house, was one of six leading hunting figures who appeared in leaked videos that offered advice on deflecting protesters and police.

Police sources said they wanted the CPS to prosecute him­ but that prosecutors did not find sufficient evidence.

Last week Mark Hankinson, a director of the Master of Foxhounds Association (MFHA), was found guilty of encouraging and assisting hunts across the country to evade the ban on fox hunting.

Passing judgment in Westminster magistrates’ court, Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram ordered Mr Hankinson to pay a fine of £1,000 along with a contribution of £2,500 towards legal costs.

However, Devon police officers involved in the case since August 2020 said they believed Mr Hankinson should not have been the only person charged under Section 44 of the Serious Crime Act 2007.

One of the investigating officers said that they wanted “six charged, including Lord Mancroft, but the CPS only charged Hankinson. We were furious that Mancroft wasn’t charged.”

Another officer said that the CPS had originally considered charging six of the officials on the leaked webinars to around 100 invited hunt enthusiasts, but that the CPS only accepted the prosecution of Mr Hankinson.

The case centred on the practice of trail laying, which is not illegal and involves the laying of a scent for riders and hounds to follow. It replicates what a traditional hunt would have looked like, but without a fox being chased, injured or killed.

However, Mr Ikram ruled that Mr Hankinson was advising on how trail laying was being used as a cover for illegal hunting.

Investigating officers and anti-hunt groups claim Lord Mancroft was another of the MFHA officials offering advice.

Mr Ikram also referred to Lord Mancroft’s comments during what was meant to be a private online meeting for hunt masters.

Lord Mancroft, who was identified on the videos as Benjamin Mancroft, told the attendees to be careful what they record on body cams during a hunt.

It is common practice for both hunters and saboteurs to record hunts in order to gather evidence of any wrongdoing from either side.

During the webinars, which were recorded on 11 August last year, Lord Mancroft, who was chairman of the MFHA until May this year, said: “Those of you who are filming and recording, please don’t stand there recording the opposition [hunt saboteurs]… flying their gizmos and blowing horns and say ‘isn’t that marvellous that they haven’t seen us because we’ve just caught a fox behind them’ or something like that. I mean you’ve got to be very careful about who’s saying what.

Referring to Lord Mancroft’s comments, Mr Ikram told the court: “I did not hear from him and, of course, the defendant isn’t responsible for another’s words. That said, all the words of the others are relevant because it tells me something about the events he was speaking at and the ‘overall agenda’ in which he was also speaking. I do make clear that the defendant is to be judged wholly on what he said but others’ words, in my view, provide context to what he said.”

Mr Ikram also pointed to comments on the videos made by Phil Davies, police liaison officer at the Countryside Alliance and former chief inspector at Dyfed Powys Police.

Advising on the advantages of laying trails, Mr Davies told hunt masters: “Now, you know more about hunting than the saboteurs or the courts know, but what it will do is create that smokescreen, or that element of doubt that we haven’t deliberately hunted a fox, so if nothing else you need to record that and it will help us to write the defence to your huntsman.”

Responding to Mr Davies’s comments, Mr Ikram told the court: “Mr Davies is, of course, right that the speakers do know more about hunting than this court. This court does however understand well concepts such as creating smokescreens and creating ‘elements of doubt on deliberately hunting foxes’ (and I emphasise the word deliberately). This court is also very familiar with the writing of defences.”

The League Against Cruel Sports, which was the official complainant in the action, called on the CPS to reopen cases against Lord Mancroft and others involved in the meetings, including Mr Davies.

A spokeswoman for the League said: “Questions need to be answered by the CPS as to why others on the webinars were not dealt with in the same manner as Hankinson.

“The CPS needs to reinvestigate why those people were not charged. Because, obviously, the threshold of evidence was met for Hankinson so there surely are questions that need to be asked about whether the threshold had been met for Lord Mancroft and the others, like Phil Davies.”

However, a spokesman for the CPS said that only the evidence against Mr Hankinson was enough to bring a prosecution.

The CPS spokesman said: “We considered possible charges against six suspects and concluded that Mark Hankinson’s case was the only one that met our legal test for a prosecution.”

A spokesman for the MFHA said the group was considering an appeal against Mr Hankinson’s conviction.

Lord Mancroft and Mr Davies were contacted for comment. Devon and Cornwall Police declined to comment.

ENDS

As an aside, the League Against Cruel Sports has published a fascinating blog which provides some insight to how the prosecution against Hankinson came about – here.

UPDATE 25th October 2021: Police boot off Countryside Alliance rep from all wildlife crime priority delivery groups after hunting webinar trial (here)

This comment piece from TV and radio broadcaster James Whale was published in The Express yesterday, in response to the ongoing and targeted abuse directed at Chris Packham by many within the hunting & shooting sector, encouraged by some of the industry’s large membership organisations.

Thanks to blog reader Keith Dancey for the link.

CHRIS Packham, whom I interviewed only the other day, is having to put up with some of the most disgusting behaviour. Opponents of the wildlife campaigner seem to think it is their right to threaten his home and his life, to tell him they are they going to kill him, to tell him his family is not safe.

This is the most revolting thing I have ever heard, I’m also furious with Facebook for not doing anything about some of the trolling that certain people get. I’m not talking about myself – I don’t care, I ignore them as they’re cretinous – but let’s think about it.

The people who are undertaking this mission to try to destroy Chris Packham are those who think he is trying to destroy what they call their fun, their hobby and maybe even their “tradition”. These are the people who think it is perfectly acceptable to go out and kill animals for the fun of it.

There are many such examples, from shooting birds to culling badgers for really no reason to Britain’s best known tradition – foxhunting. In my childhood and early life there was nothing more exciting than seeing the hunt gathering outside their local pub for a stirrup cup and then riding magnificently off into a sunny misty morning with the hounds baying.

But on reflection, when out in the field with the so-called terrier men digging the foxes from their lairs, the hounds running them to ground and literally ripping them limb from limb, it was pretty disgusting.

In past ages we used to enjoy dog fighting, cockfighting, bear baiting and various other forms of entertainment now considered disgusting.

When fox and stag hunting were legally banned, drag hunting, just using a lure for the dogs and hunters to follow, was introduced, but bloodsports fans want the laws repealed and find ways round them.

Tradition doesn’t last forever: we can talk about it, we can look back on it and I don’t want to see any pictures or statues of hunts destroyed. It is all part of our history. But those people who are prepared to carry on the pursuit of killing for fun have to be stopped. And so must their pastimes – if you can call them that.

ENDS

The following article was published in The Times last Saturday.

It sits behind a paywall so I’ve reproduced it below:

The BBC Springwatch presenter Chris Packham has described how his stepdaughter faced a torrent of online abuse after a game-shooting organisation drew attention to her social media account and the fact they are related.

Megan McCubbin, 25, faced weeks of “vile and hateful” messages after the British Association for Shooting & Conservation (BASC), pointed out her connection to Packham, 60.

Packham, who has frequently taken aim at the game-bird industry, alleges that the BASC tacitly extended an invitation to online trolls: “Here’s a young woman, a friend of Chris’s who has started working with him why don’t you have a go?”

A long-running campaign of death threats against the naturalist escalated sharply late last Friday when two men set a car on fire outside his home in the New Forest.

CCTV footage shows one man pulling on a balaclava before stepping out of a Land Rover. He sets light to what appears to be a fuse; moments later the car explodes.

“These people knew exactly what they were doing,” Packham said. “I would suggest that they had prior experience in blowing cars up.”

He added: “I think maybe because I was bullied at school, I don’t have a fear of physical violence. But if they do it to me and they get away with it, they’ll do it to other environmental campaigners. What’s next will it be an exploding car outside Greta [Thunberg’s] house?”

A spokesman for the BASC said that it did not condone online abuse. It had the right to point out to its members that McCubbin was a youth ambassador for the League Against Cruel Sports, which campaigns against shooting, he said.

“McCubbin is using the celebrity status provided by the BBC [where she is a co-presenter of Springwatch] to promote an anti-shooting agenda; we’re allowed to be critical of that,” he added. “Packham plays a very astute game. He is very good at causing the sort of publicity that attacks shooting.”

Packham has received death threats for years. In 2019, after he campaigned to end the indiscriminate shooting of jays, wood pigeons and other birds that many in the countryside consider wrongly, he says to be vermin, two dead crows were strung up outside his home.

On another occasion, an anonymous letter suggested that a traffic accident could be arranged to kill him. Fox and badger carcasses have been dumped on his drive.

Packham said it was possible that the arson attack, which is being investigated by police, was carried out by local vandals or internet trolls. However, he thinks that it was committed too efficiently for that. “I think this is probably fox-hunting related,” he said.

He has been calling for members of the National Trust to vote for a ban on trail hunting, where hounds follow a scent rather than a fox, on its land.

He suspects that the attack may have been timed to coincide with the verdict in the case of a leading huntsman who was prosecuted for allegedly providing advice on how to hunt foxes illegally, behind a smokescreen of trail hunting.

“Fox hunting was always going to come to an end,” Packham said. “But the nails are being driven in faster than they’d anticipated.” A backlash was inevitable, he added.

Speaking to The Times at the Natural History Museum in London this week, where he was presenting the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards, he was critical of how the online abuse he received had been policed. “It’s a little unfair that when black footballers receive unwanted and appalling hate crime the issue can be dealt with,” he said in a video he posted on Twitter.

“And that’s great, of course, and I would support that fully. But I am surprised that when environmentalists like myself receive similarly hateful torrents of relentless abuse nothing can be done about it.”

The arson attack on his home was part of a broader pattern, he said. “We’re living, post-pandemic, in a very angry time. A time of polarisation and division, the likes of which I’ve not seen before.”

In the past Packham has accused gamekeepers of “genocidal” practices and said that fox-hunting has a “psychopathic element”. He said that he preferred the word “extermination” to extinction” when discussing largescale biodiversity loss.

He once got into trouble for arguing that the giant panda was not worth the time, trouble and expense of saving from extinction, adding that he would happily eat the last one.

“I do weaponise vernacular to some extent,” he said. “I think that language is important, and it’s a very, very powerful tool. It has the power to incite and inflame people. No doubt about that but in a competitive world, we’ve got to get our stories out there.”

ENDS

BASC has responded to this article by stating:

“It’s ludicrous to suggest that BASC would encourage online abuse, whether that’s Chris Packham, his step daughter or anyone else for that matter“.

The BASC website article referred to by Chris in The Times was published last year and can be read here. In my view it’s targeted and abusive and celebrates how Megan’s “woke guff was admirably tackled in the comments thread by those who understand there is a far more positive side to grouse shooting“.

You can also read BASC Director Duncan Thomas’s misogynistic online abuse (here) and the apology he was later forced to make (here).

You can make up your own mind whether or not you think it’s ‘ludicrous’ to suggest that BASC staff have published online abuse about named individuals and incited others to join in.

Last year the Hunt Saboteurs Association published two secretly-recorded Zoom webinars showing some of the UK’s leading hunting personnel, including high-ranking former police officers, providing a training seminar to over 100 hunt masters across the UK about so-called ‘trail hunting’ (where hunts supposedly follow a laid scent to imitate a fox hunt, since actual fox hunting is now illegal).

Campaigners have long argued, with strong supportive evidence in many cases, that trail hunting is being used as a cover for the continuation of illegal fox hunting. Hunting organisations have denied this, of course, and have always claimed that any fox they’ve killed was caught ‘accidentally’ and not deliberately.

Campaigners claimed that the content of the two leaked webinars (see here) showed that there was now evidence to demonstrate a ‘nationwide conspiracy’ to commit perjury and flout the 2005 ban on hunting with hounds after some of the webinar trainers were caught discussing how to create a smokescreen, presumably to avoid prosecution for illegal fox hunting.

I was interested in these webinars because one of the contributors, former Police Inspector Phil Davies, serves on the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG) as a representative of the Countryside Alliance (see here). The RPPDG is supposed to help prevent raptor persecution crimes in England & Wales, although to date it has achieved naff all other than to create an impression of tackling raptor persecution.

The hunting webinars were brought to the attention of the police and an investigation was launched. This led to the prosecution of Mark Hankinson from The Hunting Office, whose trial took place in September and who last week was convicted at Westminster Magistrates Court of encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence (to illegally fox hunt).

This prosecution and conviction is a huge blow to the reputation of the hunting community and the subsequent widespread publicity will have been damaging (e.g. see here, here, here, here, here, here), with large landowners now considering whether to ban trail hunting on their land.

For those interested in the legal arguments I’d thoroughly recommend reading the following documents: the closing submissions of the defence and prosecution, and the court’s judgement.

In the blog I wrote last year about these webinars (here), I argued that it’d be interesting to see whether there were grounds for Phil Davies and/or the Countryside Alliance to be suspended from the RPPDG as the police investigation in to the webinar content got underway, in the same way that Forestry England, National Trust, United Utilities, Lake District National Park Authority and Natural Resources Wales had initiated a suspension of trail hunt licences. I also wondered whether Mr Davies’ position, and/or that of the Countryside Alliance, on the RPPDG would be reviewed after the findings of the police investigation were known.

Well, here we are a year and a bit later. Mr Davies was NOT prosecuted for his role in the webinar, only Mark Hankinson was charged and prosecuted. However, if you read the judgement document it seems quite clear to me that Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram had cause to question the intention behind the comments made by other webinar participants, including Mr Davies, and that the judge wasn’t overly impressed with Davies’ comments about ‘creating smokescreens’ and ‘creating elements of doubt’, in the judge’s view presumably made to help hunt masters avoid prosecutions for illegal fox hunting. Here is the relevant excerpt from the judgement:

As far as I’m aware, Phil Davies was not suspended from serving on the RPPDG while the trial went ahead. So what about now, with the judge’s damning remarks ringing in everyone’s ears?

UPDATE 20th October 2021: Further evidence to support a review of Countryside Alliance’s position on raptor group (here)

UPDATE 25th October 2021: Police boot off Countryside Alliance rep from all wildlife crime priority delivery groups after hunting webinar trial (here)

REVIVE, the coalition for grouse moor reform is holding its 2021 national conference at Perth Concert Hall on Sunday 14th November.

REVIVE’s first conference was held at the Perth Theatre in 2019 and was a sell out event. Two years on, interest and support for the coalition’s aims continues to grow so this year’s conference has been moved to the larger concert hall venue. Perth Concert Hall has implemented a suite of measures to help everyone stay safe – see here.

This year’s conference will be hosted by Chris Packham and the names of those speaking/presenting have just been announced in the preliminary programme, as follows:

10.00: Doors open/registration

10.30: Welcome, by Chris Packham

11.00 – 12.30: SESSION ONE, More wildlife on our moors

Ruth Tingay, Raptor Persecution UK

Robbie Marsland, League Against Cruel Sports Scotland

Kirsty Jenkins, OneKind

Colin Smyth, MSP Scottish Labour, South of Scotland

12.30 – 13.30: lunch

13.30 – 13.40: Welcome back, by Chris Packham

13.40 – 14.00: Polling and public attitudes to grouse shooting, by Mark Diffley (Director, Diffley Partnership)

14.00 – 15.00: SESSION TWO, Energising our Environment

Dr Helen Armstrong, Broomhill Ecology & author of A Better Way

Nikki Gordon, John Muir Trust

Duncan Orr-Ewing, RSPB Scotland

Mark Ruskell, MSP Scottish Greens, Mid-Scotland and Fife

15.00 – 15.20: short break

15.20 – 16.20: SESSION THREE, Land reform, people and power

Duncan McCann, economist and author of Our Land

Robin McAlpine, Common Weal

Lesley Riddoch, journalist, broadcaster and campaigner

16.20: Closing speeches (full line-up tbc)

Andy Wightman, author, campaigner & former MSP

As well as presentations and panel discussions, there’ll be a number of stalls and plenty of time in the breaks for chatting with the REVIVE directors and guest speakers, as well as opportunities for making new connections and for catching up with old friends.

Tickets for this conference are now on sale (£11.50, including £1.50 booking fee per ticket; £5 for unemployed/Under 16s) and can be bought online HERE

I look forward to seeing some of you there.

For those of you who want to find out more about the REVIVE coalition for grouse moor reform, please visit the website here