Guest election blog – Conservatives by Derek Gow

I am a wildlife ecologist who has worked on reintroduction projects for species such as the water vole, Eurasian beaver and the white stork. I have written three books, the last of which – The Hunt for The Shadow Wolf – was published by Chelsea Green in March 2024. 

This is my third manifesto review to date – it’s the Tories and I just can’t summon a hip hooray that’s honest – so shall we move on with it ?

Before we start with anything relevant, let me tell you my own personal Boris story, as it illuminates quite aptly what follows hereafter. Professor Richard Brazier from Exeter University introduced him to me. I am unclear as to just how exactly they first met. While it might have had something to do with the boxes of Kalashnikovs and RPG’s in the back of the pick-up truck he drove up to our rendezvous on Exmoor and the Aldi bags laden with greasy £1000 notes that replaced them on our way home I just really can’t say.

But they were embarrassingly close.

When we got to his dad’s farm, Richard suggested that we should ingratiate ourselves to him by providing the beaver pelt – which I generally carry with me as an emergency spare – to him on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that it was a tradition of the ancient Britons to swaddle their first-born sons in the skin of this absorbent creature. I duly did so to Boris’s delight. He asked me if I thought the Romans might have worn the species as head dress when they surged through the surf around Colchester to invade our shores nearly 2000 years ago. I said it was unlikely. When he asked again, I said that I really thought not as nowhere at all in the Testaments of Asterix did it infer that anything other than beasts of a carnivorous kind were employed. Lions, bears, tigers and leopards are after all illustrated in his historically accurate tome.

Beavers with their big buck teeth are not.

Unimpressed he surged off through his father’s fields to a nearby mound where the sightless eye slits of the slim cadaver bobbed gently in the breeze above his own. There in silence he stopped, hands on hips, defiant, to view ? – well nothing much at all. An odd curious sheep of a simplistic disposition and some sniggering rabbits where the long grass met the bracken.

A noble gesture of a quite utterly meaningless sort.

But when we as a nation began our relationship with the Conservative party sooooooo long ago, it was slick Dave who wooed and won us. ‘Vote blue, get green’ was his manifesto slogan which, once elected, really only helped his pal Creepy-George Osborne ensure that HS2’s destructive tracking was rerouted around the perimeter of his constituency’s most wealthy pals at a cost of £93 million a mile.

Homes for the blind and orphanages were demolished to provide its foundations.

We were never together in the pain he imposed upon us.  

Simply awful people with twisted personal bents were disposed of, on DEFRA. Owen Paterson; who blamed badgers for moving the goal posts before old Fred, his gamekeeper, reminded him through his ear trumpet it was actually buzzards. Therese Coffey insisted that nature did not matter – if indeed what she actually snuffled was interpretable at all –  before dropping more food down her front and quaffling another cigar. Gove tried – sincerely or not – and for a time made a difference while Zac Goldsmith who could have ably accomplished so much was never allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

International and oceanic achievements were fine but he made no decisions on beavers.

And now, as we face the end – no longer Boris on the prow facing the oncoming hordes boldly – just Rishi the rodent bolting from burrow to burrow, what’s left to expect?

Well, more help for farmers without sanction. Yes, they will keep ELM going until, one day, they strangle it before announcing that they haven’t. Agriculture as normal which the government’s own figures suggest is 0.6% of GDP – nearly as much as the wrapped sandwich and toy industries combined  – is worth only 50% of the cosmetics industry and yet it will continue to receive somewhere in the region of £4 billion ring-fenced to remain afloat. Some of the industry’s ills will be alleviated by reinstating ‘national service’ for farm serfs in the fruit-picking landscapes of the eastern squirearchy, who will pay them a pittance to be abused.  

There will be no changes to the Hunting Act, so if your grandmother has a coronary, wandering packs of hounds on a B-road at midday will halt her ambulance until her blood clots.

That’s guaranteed and ring fenced as well

Natural England – who are toothless to the gums already – the good people left when they were told to stamp Letterset licences for badger assassination – along with the Environment Agency will have their remits repurposed to ensure that they trouble not the sloppers of slurry into our drinking water supply; more forests full of Sitka will be built;  flooding will be solved by ‘natural solutions’ which don’t involve more wetlands;  the disease-ridden damp routes which transport pesticides, cocaine and condoms to our dying sea will be purified in an instant and another national park which will fail before it’s begun will be inaugurated.

Livestock worrying will be cured by sheep feng shui which will assure them emphatically that they are not born to die.

In a bells and smells sort of fashion.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  

Honestly, it’s all too late and too pathetically unconvincing even if it appeals to anyone at all. If you care at all about the environment or your children’s future in it then just don’t vote for these despotic odd balls.

The damage they have done runs deep enough.

In conclusion the only thing I was intrigued by were their plans for Sycamore Gap.

There they have promised to heal.

A 25ft beige weiner, purchased or pinched from outside a fuel station – cause their funding is  pretty tight  – will be positioned to flail in its new location atop the stump where the mighty tree once stood. Forever after will this noble monument flatulate in memory of both the tree and Tory benevolence towards it.  

Until the very next day when it’s burst by a shrew.   

This is one of a series of opinion pieces on the political parties’ 2024 general election manifestos. They were commissioned by Wild Justice several months ago by approaching a wide variety of conservationists and environmentalists long before the date of the general election was known. Some people who originally agreed to write pieces found the date and short timescale impossible and had to back out. We did not know what they would write and their only brief was to pick one or two political parties’ election manifestos and tell us what they liked and didn’t like about their environmental policies. We didn’t tell people what to write and we haven’t edited what they wrote (except to squeeze things into a common format, to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors and typos). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Wild Justice.