Labour's obsession with the religion of 'rewilding' threatens lives, livelihoods - and deadly moorland blazes

Daily Mail​

12 hours ago

Wildfires are getting too close for comfort. The weekend blaze on Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh is the latest in a series of fires in what is already by far the worst year on record in this country.
Our National Fire Chiefs Council has warned that not only are blazes increasingly common, they are increasingly dangerous and starting to cross the 'rural-urban interface'. As we have sadly seen in Los Angeles, even homes are under threat.
The smoke, too, poses real dangers. The fumes from the devastating blaze on Saddleworth Moor in 2018 were inhaled by more than five million people, for example. The result, say scientists, is that more than 20 lives were brought to a premature end.
You might be glad to learn that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has put Angela Rayner in charge of the Government's response to this growing crisis. Or maybe you're not.
Because I cannot see a single thing that Deputy Prime Minister Ms Rayner has done to tackle a threat made worse by tinder-dry vegetation – which is made all the more combustible thanks to the sharp reduction in humidity as the climate warms.
So a smart response would be to reduce the volume of vegetation on our hillsides. And for thousands of years, this is exactly what our ancestors did by conducting controlled burns in the winter months.
The vegetation, including dead bracken and heather, is carefully set ablaze by gamekeepers when the weather is cold and damp. The result is to lessen the intensity of wildfires that take hold in the summer by creating firebreaks and reducing the amount of fuel available.
Burns like this also create a habitat for game birds, including grouse, curlew and lapwing, to thrive.
This ancient wisdom is backed up by scientific research which shows that, when done with skill and experience, preventative fires produce less smoke than uncontrolled blazes and even help sequester carbon.
Efficient winter burns brush across the surface of the wet ground, leaving the moss and peat below untouched.
Famously, you can place a Mars bar on the ground in the midst of a preventative heather fire and it won't melt.
Yet this Government doesn't do ancient wisdom. And it doesn't do science. It does the religion of 'rewilding'.
Beloved among metropolitan eco warriors, this obsession opposes traditional farming methods and demands that the landscape and its ecosystems be returned to the chaos of nature.
As a fad it's relatively new, but even so it has done enormous damage.
It is hard not to believe the drive to rewild our uplands – which effectively means abolishing managed grouse moors – is being led, at least in part, by the metropolitan Left's sheer animosity towards country sports in general and gamekeepers in particular.
Among other things, the creed of rewilding outlaws precautionary winter burns on our hillsides. The result of such bans is that year in, year out, the vegetation keeps growing. And out-of-control vegetation can lead to out-of-control fires.
It is a particular irony that Ms Rayner's constituents in Ashton-under-Lyne, east of Manchester, were among those who could see the flames on Saddleworth Moor. For the blaze started on land where Natural England, the Government's environmental quango, was carrying out its rewilding vision by banning winter burns.
Despite the evidence, the Labour Government, driven by Ms Rayner, is now attempting to ban preventative fires on swathes of English upland, with plans afoot to outlaw burns on hills and moors with a peat depth of 30 centimetres (11in) or more.
The claim is that this would protect the peat.
The zealots at Natural England want to go much further still, however, and – by threatening to withdraw subsidies to landowners – is attempting to outlaw burns on hills with a mere 10cm (4in) peat depth.
Covering pretty much all English peat land, this means vast areas of the countryside would see vegetation building up with no control. It would be like putting jerry cans of petrol on our hillsides. Sooner or later, they will catch fire.
The snobbery facing country people is best summed up by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which, needless to say, is pushing for the ban on burning heather in the winter months. In fact, the RSPB is running what amounts in my view to a campaign of slander against country people. And that, in turn, is fuelling intimidation.
One RSPB executive, for example, told listeners to BBC Radio 4's Today programme that gamekeepers were a 'co-ordinated gang of armed criminals roaming the uplands'.
The same type of language is used in RSPB press releases.
The result? Threats against, and even physical attacks on, gamekeepers, who will be especially vigilant this week as the Glorious Twelfth marks the start of the grouse shooting season.
Yet gamekeepers are the heart of the countryside.
If the craziness directed at them does not end, then jobs will be destroyed. Rural communities will disintegrate.
Moorland hotels, taxi drivers and restaurants all rely on the seasonal income set to be destroyed by the vilification from the RSPB on the one hand and the mindless stupidity of Natural England on the other.
Labour's old motto was that 'things can only get better'.
Under this Government, things seem only to get worse.
We have seen ever more pylons, turbines, solar farms, urban sprawl and now the threat of unnecessary wildfires. Draw your own conclusions.
So as another heatwave takes hold, and the threat of deadly conflagrations grows, Labour MPs in rural seats should have a word with the Deputy Prime Minister.
Ms Rayner and the too-clever-by-half pen-pushers at Natural England might take a moment to reflect on why so many scientists and powerful people disagree with them about the urgent measures we must take to protect ourselves from wildfires.
In June, the G7 group of nations issued a declaration on the wildfire crisis which recommended... winter burns.
A week earlier the White House issued an order that there must be no restrictions on preventative burns in the US, the lack of which has been cited as a factor is last year's catastrophic California fires.
Meanwhile, the European Commission recommends reducing wildfire risk by having more livestock grazing to keep the vegetation short.
Yet what has Natural England done? It has decreed that the number of cattle and sheep on our hills be sharply reduced – a policy enforced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs through its regime of subsidies. Sheep numbers have fallen by 7 per cent in the past two years.
Country people care about this issue because they hate seeing their hillsides scarred. They hate finding the burnt bodies of animals which could not escape.
And these, remember, are the farmers, gamekeepers and their wives who are on the front line helping to put out wildfires.
Sooner or later, people will be killed fighting wildfires or die in their homes. The voters will know who to blame.