What a waste of time that was. 5 years of to-ing and fro-ing during which reams of paper were produced, experts went back and forth, committee room lights burned into the night and, of course expenses were doled out. At the end of it the Lead Ammunition Group (LAG) is effectively no more and the Government has given its blessing to the continued use of leadshot. That decision, delivered by Liz Truss MP as her final act as Environment Secretary, was really never in doubt, given the procedural shortcomings of the Group. These included mysterious failures to circulate minutes of meetings, inflexibility over the timings of those meetings and most damming of all, drawing conclusions from the flimsiest of bases. In the case of this latter, evidence on the long term health impact on humans of exposure to lead through the consumption of game, was gathered from two ‘experts’ neither of whom had any medical qualifications.
The man in charge of the LAG was John Swift, former chief of BASC, who until retiring from his job there in 2013 had spent years defending shooting and the use of leadshot. Apparently won over by those demanding its prohibition, Swift quickly became something of a bete noire to his former colleagues, whose views were airily dismissed after they had walked out on the LAG en-masse last year. The fight will go on, because bodies supporting a ban such as the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS) have no reason for existing beyond opposing fieldsports. The lesson they need to learn, however, is that where leadshot is concerned appeals to emotion backed up by spurious evidence simply won’t cut it.