Legal Aid changes will help opponents of shooting

Shooting Times magazine has rightly pointed out some of the ramifications for those involved in country sports in general and shooting in particular, arising from proposals to limit the scope and availability of legal aid. Whilst the Government is right to wish to curtail the burgeoning costs of the service, it is wrong to incentivise solicitors and others (those others to whom legal aid provision has now been contracted out include, rather bizarrely, Tesco and hauliers, Eddie Stobart) to persuade their clients to plead guilty.

But there is another equally unpleasant consequence. As we have seen elsewhere on this page, those opposed to fieldsports rarely go after those who have the wherewithal to defend themselves. It is the gamekeeper or beater who finds him or herself on the receiving end when things turn nasty. To the anti-fieldsports lobby any legal case is an end in itself, but if the odds of victory are improved by dint of the fact that those they are persecuting are being pressured by their own side not to fight back, it doesn’t take much to work out where this could lead.