The news that John Batley (pictured), Director of the Gun Trade Association (GTA) is to retire, sees the end of an era. During his time in office Batley has been at the forefront of the fight to rein in some of the more fanciful and wrongheaded proposals to restrict gun ownership and shooting and which have reared their head from time to time during the more than 20 years he has been in the job. But just as it is to be hoped that the GTA Council will be able to find a suitably qualified candidate to carry on Batley’s work, so it must be hoped that whoever succeeds to the role brings with them an enthusiasm for the commercial side of the industry.
One of the real challenges which any trade organisation faces when seeking a leader is that the two principle qualities required rarely reside in one individual. Those qualities are in the first case an attention to minutiae and a bureaucratic turn of mind – trade organisations produce lots of detail, much of it dreary but most of it important. The second quality is a real talent for salesmanship and marketing; driving an industry forward is no different to leading a business. Whilst Batley embodied the former in spades, he has showed no discernible interest in, (indeed some suggest he has been out rightly resistant to), anything of the latter. This is most visibly demonstrated by the GTA’s website, which is both dull and uninformative and its presence at the IWA show, where its role in promoting the UK shooting industry has been ineffectual in the extreme.
John Batley has been happy to accept credit for the modest growth in GTA membership numbers during his tenure. This is arguably a little disingenuous on his part, for it fails to acknowledge the way in which GTA benefits from the circle of wagons effect. Like the trade bodies representing the drinks and tobacco industries, GTA membership is driven more by the need to find shelter from those who would seek to legislate the business out of existence, rather than because of them being impressed by the professionalism and forward-thinking nature of the representative body. Were shooting not so threatened, the GTA would have to work far harder than it does to attract and keep members. Brexit and the prospect of the UK moving out of the reach of EU regulation in the area of gun ownership and shooting, might mean a time of less pressure on the shooting sports in this country with the result that the GTA might have to look more closely at its history of its marketing support for members and its promotion of the business as a whole.