Rally Speech made by Robin Page
It's a real privilege to be here because I am a countryman. The countryside is under threat. You are under threat and what you are doing today I think is brilliant.
I do have one apology for someone who is not here today and that is Jackie Ballard; apparently her ego is so big she could not get up the small country lanes. The other thing, of course, is she wants to be Leader of the Liberal Demorats but yet everything she does, and everything she says, is illiberal and undemocratic. She wants to be a leader of a Party but she will not even lead her own people and that is pathetic for a politician to be trying to gain personal prestige at a day like this when part of her constituency is under threat, and when she has a cultural, rural minority in her own constituency which she ignores, is a disgrace and it goes to show the sort of full time politicians that we have got today, and that is they care about themselves and they do not give a stuff about you. I don't even know why she wants to be a Leader because they are going nowhere. If Paddy Pantsdown gets to Europe, then I hope he pulls his pants up.
I am doing a book at the moment about the crisis in the countryside and I start it like this. "The countryside is in crisis - farming incomes have plummeted, farms and wildlife are disappearing, traditional landscapes are facing the bulldozer, the chainsaw and the 12-furrow plough. Fields are being transformed into food factories and the land itself is being stolen for recreation and development and for holiday homes. Rural communities are dying and the sport of hunting is under constant attack. As a direct result, the whole of our culture is threatened and this is a society that boasts of its multi-culturalism.".
I believe that Parliament and the people who rule us are treating us like second rate citizens. The very people who should be helping us are actually hindering us. The 'National Trust' have become the 'National Mis-Trust' and I believe they are selling you down the river. Do they want buildings? Do they want an empty countryside? Do they want a theme park or do they want a living, working countryside with real people in it nd real rural communities thriving?
There is only one answer and what they have said actually is 'NO', that is not what they want. They want fudge shops. It's a wonder they have not got a fudge shop here with the National Trust selling you fudge. And that is all we get from them, fudge, after fudge, after fudge. I am going to stand for the National Trust Council in the autumn and I will try to get rid of some of that fudge and to get some common sense in its place.
And what is the League Against Cruel Sports doing here? - I want to know - They should be at Lords talking to the cricketers about the cruelty that all English people who watch cricket are suffering. They should clear off to London unless of course we asked them what they are doing on their reserve? Has MAFF looked at the way they have introduced badgers to their reserve? I find it amazing that a body dealing with animal welfare should have brought badgers into the middle of a TB area. Has there been control? Does MAFF know about this? Is it legal? We want to know the answers!
And then we come to another joker - Professor Bateson. Can you believe that a serious scientist on the first page of a major report, mentioned Bambi! "Can you remember crying as children when Bambi's mother was hunted?". She was not, Professor Bateson, she was shot! You got it wrong in your first three sentences and you expect us to take the rest of your report as gospel. And another thing. Where is the worst wildlife in my area of Cambridgeshire? Some of the worst is nearest to me. It's on prairie farms that have lost their skylarks, that have lost their English partridges, that have lost their hares, which have been devastated by intensive farming - and who owns it? King's College, and who is the Provost of King's College? Professor Bateson! Why is Professor Bateson telling you how to manage Exmoor when he cannot manage the land a spitting distance from his own college. It's a pathetic situation and when is Cambridge University going to actually instal a Professorship of Common Sense, because we have not got any at the moment?
There is one thing that would have happened in any other country if they were managing their wildlife like you. If deer were in such good condition, if the flocks and herds were as healthy as they are here in Zimbabwe or in Kenya, the people from Professor Bateson's own department would be saying it was a good utilisation of a natural resource; and if you want to see bad farming go and have a look at some National Trust farms, farmed in hand. I was up in the Lake District recently and talking to farmers. Their incomes have gone down 50% and the National Trust have put their rents up 25%, and men in suits with no roots and no culture say "if you don't want to take it on we have got plenty who will", and that is what they think of it. Men without suits with real roots and with real culture are being overtaken by the bureaucrats - the rootless, the cultureless, who just see the countryside as a thing of money and to make more money - and I think it's absolutely disgusting.
And then we have Jack Cunningham - flies around the world in Concorde - they call him Junket Jack - while he is putting farming into poverty street. His ban on T-bone steak was an absolute disgrace and it has made the situation even worse.
Talking to people here, I have heard of people getting tuppence a fleece for their wool. How can people survive on that? Do our politicians understand? It has got to stop. Since CJD there have been about 20 people die, allegedly from eating meat, which I do not actually believe. In the same period 400 farmers have committed suicide and who has given a stuff about that? Certainly not our politicians, certainly not our media, and certainly not the National Trust!
The whole thing is coming to an issue of human rights. We have just had a war about ethnic cleansing and the Government and Parliament are trying to culturally change you. It is trying to change the whole rural way of life in contravention of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of United Nations on 10th December 1948. We just went into Yugoslavia because people were breaking human rights and our own Government is breaking them here against you. Everyone is entitled to all the Rights and Freedoms in this Declaration without distinction of any kind. We are being discriminated against. All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.
If an anti were to go into a football club, go into a gay club, most probably they're there all the time anyway - if they were to go to the Brixton Carnival and shout the things that they shout at you, they would be in prison before they could say Jack Straw. If things keep going on as they are, everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community. The cultural life of this community revolves around hunting and they are both threatened and I believe this makes our Government guilty of breaking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and will Jack Straw actually prosecute his own Government and his own Parliament?
We are fighting for our civil rights; we are fighting for our culture; we are fighting for our way of life - for goodness sake, keep it up. Thank you.
Robin Page, Farmer, Countryman, Presenter of "One Man and His Dog and author of his latest book "The Hunting Gene", his twenty-third.