I’ve bet that angling will be banned or stopped in all its forms, except for some limited fishing for the pot within 10 – 12 years. And unless we get our act together right now I think I’ll win that bet.
I expect you think I’m daft because ‘everyone knows’ there are ‘too many people who fish for any government to ban it’. We’ve heard warnings ‘Angling’s Next’ time after time in the last few years from the Countryside Alliance and hunters, and most have said ‘yeah, yeah, but it can’t happen to us.”
But if you believe that angling is ‘safe’ then think again and “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid”.
Now I’ve spoken to and watched the activities of what were original ‘Antis’ and ‘Hunt Saboteurs’ since the late 60’s. They were then, as some admitted, funded from Communist Russia to stir up class warfare in Britain as part of destabilising the West. The ‘Animal Rights’ movements grew alongside the Vegan food movements with one simple endgame, a vegetarian society where no meat or fish is eaten and animals are no longer a part of our lives.
You can dismiss them as the loonies they are, but remember Hitler was a loony, Stalin was mad as a hatter and looking at today’s crop of left wing politicians I could go on. Tiny in number, yes they are, but the ‘Animal Rights’ lobby have achieved huge political clout with New Labour. Partly through massive donations, £ 1.1m in 1997 alone, and with Labour MPs who actively work to promote their misbegotten causes. Like it or not they have clout where it counts today with New Labour, and the old saying ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ is never more true than today.
Of course you can dismiss what I say, keep your rose-tinted spectacles on and keep chanting ‘there are too many anglers for angling to be banned’.
Sounds good enough, let’s have another drink and talk of tomorrow’s fishing. Well if that’s your view then you are sleep walking into the end of your angling and one day in the not very distant future ‘tomorrow’s fishing’ will be the last.
Think about it
Wake up, take off those tinted specs and just for a few minutes sit down, read this and think hard and deeply about it. Now politicians won’t ban angling today when as many people fish as do today and when public opinion is still with angling. But they will when those opinions have been changed and there will be no defence for angling then. I have little doubt that is only a few short years away!
‘Roadmap to an Angling Ban’
Now don’t just switch off at that because I am going to show you how it can and, I believe, will happen. The animal rights campaigners have their plans in place, the funds to do it and it is underway now. Their ‘Roadmap to an Angling Ban’ is well prepared and carefully plotted out:
1. Close down or restrict existing fisheries
2. Reduce the number of anglers year on year
3. Change public opinion against angling (particularly in children)
4. Maintain political funding
5. Angling ban.
Closing down or restricting existing fisheries is not as difficult as you might think because there are some nice, warm and fluffy arguments that the public and politicians will understand and buy into and of course it’s not a ban. I can see some politicians saying, hand on heart, “Its for environmental reasons, of course it won’t restrict people’s fishing”. Can’t you!
Angling sabs have a well proven formula for getting angling banned on Local Authority waters. This is based on changing local perception of anglers based on rubbish and litter left behind, waterbirds killed by discarded tackle and pictures of a songbird trapped and dying after swallowing a hook and bait on the end of a piece of broken line stuck in a bush. It works and if you go through anti websites you will find details of lakes where they have got angling banned.
So that’s at a local level but now just look a bit further.
Legislation required by the EU
There is the Animal Welfare bill before parliament and in its current form could make anglers liable to potential charges of cruelty. Labour have said it will not, but the bill as it is written can do so, and New Labour have consistently failed to understand or chosen to hide the true effects of much of the vast number of laws they have introduced. I neither trust nor believe them on this.
EU legislators has already taken the first steps towards a ban on all non-native species from waterbodies in any member nation. That would mean that rainbow trout, catfish, zander and virtually all carp species except crucians would have to be removed from the UK under the control of the Environment Agency. Now think about how many fisheries you go to that would suddenly not be quite so interesting and no longer financially viable. And for those of you who haven’t woken up to it yet about 70% of the legislation in Parliament in recent years has simply been to implement legislation required by the EU! That’s why this election has focused on so few areas, the rest are no longer under our control – we must do as Brussels says since New Labour have signed over so much to them. And that’s why the identity card issue won’t go away. Britain is required to bring it in under EU instructions!
British legislation will be proposed, on environmental and animal welfare grounds of course, to ensure that all fisheries have set limits on their stocking and stocking mix rates. This would be to ensure that species diversity is maintained for a healthy water environment and that stocking levels never exceed a waterbody’s ability to support that number of fish from its natural food resources.
Apart from the arguments based on environmental and animal welfare grounds and to keep anglers quiet or ignored the antis will throw in this argument at the same time:
“From pure commercial greed, fisheries deliberately and cruelly overstock lakes with very large numbers of large fish. Far more than the lake’s natural food sources can feed so the fish have no choice but to take the angler’s bait – just to get enough food to survive. They are forced to be caught time and time again just to stay alive, all for the selfish cruelty of anglers after an ‘easy catch’. Each time being put through agony as the angler enjoys as long ‘a fight’ as possible before the exhausted fish is put back in the water, usually with a severely injured mouth.”
Saving Nemo
Interesting arguments and it will not only be New Labour politicians who will buy into the environmental and diversity arguments! The cruelty side will be quietly supported and encouraged by many animal rights supporting Labour MPs and will also take root with large chunks of the public and children who have been watching ‘Saving Nemo’ and similar. So now we have the cruelty argument taking deeper root, and I’ll come back to that later.
Will all the fisheries you know still be as attractive then? I doubt it.Fishery owners and managers can work out if they would still be viable, and which would be able to remain in business after those bits of ‘environmental’ legislation!
My bet is a sizeable chunk would close down over the following two or three years, and so far less places to fish. Now those that remain would be able to increase charges, and between reducing numbers and increasing cost many people would fish far less than they do today. That will also change the way we fish and what we fish for.
Then for good measure and of course for sound environmental reasons and to preserve fish stocks look for increasing restrictions on fishing on rivers and public waters.
Okay, so now we are looking at objectives 1 and 2 starting to be achieved, reducing the number of fisheries and, as a result, the number who fish.
The less people who fish, the less concern a ban is to politicians.
Changing public perception
Now lets look at objective 3, Changing public perception of angling, because this is the one which will get angling banned. Who is against angling and wants it banned? Well let’s start with the RSPCA, they state it is cruel and their Chief Executive Jackie Ballard (a Liberal Democrat ex-MP, anti-hunting) has publicly stated she wants to see angling banned.
PETA, with their adverts showing a fluffy dog with a huge hook through its mouth), hunt saboteurs looking to bring their extreme violence against angling, and many more well known organisations. They have huge budgets they are prepared to spend on advertising, publicity and on ‘political funding’ (New Labour received around £ 1.1million in 1997 alone from those wanting hunting banned).
How will they ever manage to change public perception? Well you will have seen the full page adverts in national press about hunting so think of those but with the following messages and pictures against angling.
- Dog with hook through mouth – cruelty
- Fish with ripped and torn mouths from repeated hooking – unable to feed – cruelty
- Fish shown floating dead and decaying – damage by anglers; live fish with ulcers and fungal infections
- Songbirds hanging upside down with fluttering wings trapped by discarded line
- Swans and other water fowl trapped in line – or drowned
- Banks littered with cans, line, bottles and other rubbish posing a real danger to wildlife
- Overstocked and overcrowded fisheries and holding tanks
Here are some more of their arguments, and these will be addressed at children in and out of school as well as the general public.
- Cruelty – fish feel pain just as all other animals do – demonstrated by the RSPCA commissioned report and other research around the world
- Fish are not pests and they are not caught for food apart from a tiny percentage called ‘game’ fish such as trout. These are bred in fish farms fed a diet including all manner of hormones and antibiotics before being released into a small number of lakes or rivers for ‘pleasure anglers’ to catch and take home to eat. These captive bred fish are used to being fed by man and are an easy catch – but still made to ‘fight’ for up to an hour in sheer agony against the sharp hook impaled through their mouth
- Catch and release is inhumane and deliberate cruelty – it involves the deliberate breeding of fish so that they can be tortured time and time again by anglers whose only thought is their own ‘pleasure’
- Lakes are overstocked, beyond their natural level and ability to support a healthy population of fish – knowing that the fish will have to take baits and hook themselves through the mouth or starve to death – making it easier for so-called ‘sportsmen’ to catch and torture fish for their own selfish cruel pleasure
Getting angry yet? Well when this lets loose, as it will now that hunting is banned and shooting restrictions are being brought in by the back door, the public will begin to see angling in that light.
And all of this supported by letter writing campaigns to MPs and press.With carefully crafted public opinion polls where questions lead people into saying angling is cruel and should be banned, and before you know it you have a ‘majority’ of public opinion which wants a ban!
Not long then before the non-fishing public start to see that as the ‘true ‘ picture of angling. Of course anglers will fight back to portray the true picture but the same tactics will be used against anglers as against hunters to discredit them. Sabs who have changed from hunting to angling will begin to bring out stories of how they have been ‘beaten up’ by anglers when mounting ‘peaceful’ protests against angling and the term ‘angling thug’ and ‘angling scum’ will be widely used in the press by them.
Two government reports showed that hunting was not cruel, but…
Finally what will MPs do in the face of that public opinion? Well lets go back a step or two and look at how MPs treated hunting and the facts about hunting. Not one but two government reports showed that hunting was not cruel. At the same time the Government’s own ‘Angling Spokesman’, Martin Salter, wanted the Utility and Cruelty tests removed from the Hunting Bill because, as he explained, Angling could not meet either of these tests and would face a future ban! So even the Government’s own angling spokesman admits it is cruel, and the animal rights have already seized on this.
MPs banned hunting despite scientific evidence that it was not cruel. MPs, looking at a bill to ban angling will have clear cut evidence that it is cruel, with only one possible exception, and that is where it is for food.
With public opinion by then in favour of a ban and with a reduced number of anglers, MPs will ban it – and don’t forget how New Labour and their MPs have become heavily connected to the animal rights movements. They receive huge donations from the animal rights movement and he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Whether you accept it or not, there is a battle between the animal rights movement and all who have any involvement with animals in any way. They want full legal rights (equivalent to human rights) for all animals and that includes fish. They want a vegan society where man is no longer living with, involved with or making use of animals in any way. They have well laid out plans to achieve this and are prepared to play a very long game to achieve it. Banning angling is one of the steps on that route and unless we wake up and start fighting now – it will happen.
Don’t say you were never warned
But if you still believe ‘angling will never be banned’ you haven’t looked at the long term plans and very carefully laid strategies and tactics that the thinking part of the loony animal rights movement have come up with. It may be a shock to you when it comes but you won’t be able to say you weren’t warned !
So wake up now and get involved to fight for your sport. There is a general election coming up and I have no doubt that if another Labour Government is elected we will see the first restrictions being imposed on angling within a year or two in some of the ways I set out earlier. The Animal Welfare Bill is scheduled to become Law later this year and as that stands it can cause great difficulty for anglers.
Get out and talk to others, make everyone aware of the true dangers angling faces, and make sure that you vote for MPs who are committed to preserve country sports and personally I would not trust a single Labour politician to do that – regardless of what they might promise you or say – that is apart from Kate Hoey.
