Are gamekeepers right to believe that the RSPB has been using hate speech against them?

According to the United Nations definition, hate speech is “Any communication that attacks or discriminates against a person or group based on their identity factors”. You will notice that this does not limit the applicability of the term. It is not just race or religion. It is far wider than that. There may be different legal consequences, but the principle does not change. Britannica defines hate speech as, “Speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership of a social group”. 

The issue of hate speech in the countryside has recently arisen because of an interesting piece of research that has just been published setting out the substantial contribution moorland gamekeepers make to conservation, and to the culture of their locality. In the course of gathering the data, the researchers discovered the appalling fact that on average, on English grouse moors, a gamekeeper is physically assaulted every 12 days. To acts of physical violence can be added almost daily threats and abuse from complete strangers, and daily acts of criminal damage to kit and equipment.

No other rural workers have to put up with this level of malignity. Why gamekeepers? Well, if you ask them, and that is what you are supposed to do when addressing prejudice, they are very clear. They think it is in large part the consequence of years of “communications that attack and discriminate against them based on their identity factors”.

They also believe that these communications emanate primarily, and most effectively, from a single rich and powerful charity: the RSPB. They believe that they have been the recipients of a decades-long campaign of hate speech from the most powerful player in the conservation industry. They are entitled to that belief, and they have grounds.

Let us start with a surprising source. Over a decade ago, when Mark Avery left the RSPB, and before he found a career in attacking shooting, he was, for a few months, surprisingly open about his real views. He wrote an interesting article in The Field based on a visit to Glen Tanar and a conversation he had with the head keeper. This is what he wrote.

“Something else Colin said struck home. I'd heard it said many times before, I'd even heard it from a vocal ex-gamekeeper earlier that day, but it was when Colin said it that I really listened: the one thing that really annoyed him was when all gamekeepers were tarred with the same brush - as being the bad guys - because they included him and he was doing his best. I guess he meant the RSPB because my former employer is the most outspoken on the subject, and Colin might well have had me, personally, in mind as I have done my share of speaking out on the topic. He made me realise how it must feel for him, one of the good guys, to hear words which seem to damn all without exception. Fair point.”

So even Mark Avery conceded that RSPB was denigrating gamekeepers as a social group and discriminating against them based on their identity. In fact, the idea that he wasn't already fully aware that he and RSPB were denigrating gamekeepers as a social group is hardly credible. He is not stupid, and you would have to be very stupid to need Colin to point out what was going on.

Sadly, the knowledge had no effect on Mark, who just carried on regardless. At one point he ran a blog based on what his followers thought would be good collective noun for gamekeepers. All were offensive, some were so bad that even he wouldn't publish them, and all fell within the UN definition of hate speech. It is not possible to find another social group which could be treated in that way without some consequence, but that only highlights the shocking nature of what is going on.

It is doubtful if the RSPB were even aware of Avery's brief concern about their involvement in hate speech. They may not read The Field. What is not in doubt is that they continued to do what he had seen was wrong. There are a lot of examples.

The arrival of the lammergeier or bearded vulture on Howden Moor in the Peak District resulted in 'twitcher frenzy'. The shooting tenant of Howden Moor, his gamekeeper and gamekeepers in general, became the subject of outrageous attacks from people wading about amongst wader chicks and mountain hare leverets. If this had been triggered by some ignorant remarks by a twitcher from Islington it might be forgotten ­­­– but it was not.

It was triggered by an official RSPB spokesman who told the press that the arrival of the vulture on Howden was the equivalent of “A turkey spending Christmas in a butcher’s shop”. To that can be added previous statements that grouse moor keepers were, 'Armed gangs of criminals' roaming the uplands. That they created 'burned, bare and barren, industrial landscapes’. That they were responsible for the absence of raptors in the Peak District, and that their management malpractice was, according to the RSPB's chairman, “One of the main reasons for wildlife decline in the uplands”, specifically citing the Peak District, stating that, “Lapwing, dunlin and snipe are declining in the Peak District faster than elsewhere.”

There is of course more, a lot more. No one could reasonably claim that the RSPB has not been obsessed with gamekeepers and their real or imagined sins for a very long time. Even the bird crime report shows this. Gone are the days when it dealt with bird crime. Now it only deals with raptor crime and the RSPB's enforcement arm appears from the document to have little interest in anything other than gamekeepers.

In the Peak District the RSPB sought a Heritage Lottery Grant of nearly £700,000 which would pay for people to tour schools to tell the children that the Peak District was devoid of raptors because they were all being killed by gamekeepers. They were entirely relaxed about telling a gamekeeper’s child, and their school mates and teachers, that gamekeepers – including presumably the child's parent – were killing raptors illegally and were responsible for the complete absence of birds of prey.

Sometimes hate speech becomes so institutionalised that the people responsible don't even notice. That a gamekeeper has killed a bird of prey does not justify remorselessly telling everyone that all gamekeepers kill birds of prey. The oldest trick of the charlatan is to argue from the particular to the general. Jimmy Savile was a TV presenter, so TV presenters are sexual predators. Really? Everyone one can see that that is unfair and untenable, but when it comes to gamekeepers even the official spokesmen of a huge and powerful charity are happy to do the same thing to innocent people and their families.

But if it is true, surely it's not hate speech? Perhaps – but it's not true. The bearded vulture had arrived at a place of sanctuary not, as the RSPB claimed, “a butcher’s shop”.  It survived perfectly well despite the constant disturbance of hordes of twitchers, but by chance the butcher’s shop was the proud possessor of independent validation.

In 2014, at the time when, according to the RSPB grant application,“In the Dark Peak woodlands and moors, populations of some protected birds are in dramatic decline and this part of the Peak District National Park is becoming a no-go zone for some of Britain's most cherished wildlife”. All this as a result of “illegal persecution and inappropriate moorland management”, the then-CEO of the Peak Park wrote an article in the Derbyshire Magazine about a visit he made to Howden Moor, the place singled out for attack as a butcher’s shop by RSPB. This is what he wrote:

“I had the privilege of joining Peak District Birds Initiative field worker Jamie Horner on a moor. We walked out on a hot August evening, deep into the heather, and sat on a ridge overlooking a broad expanse of moor owned by the National Trust and run by pioneering moorland conservationist Geoff Eyre. For an hour we watched buzzard, merlin, kestrels and peregrines. We speculated that the peregrines may have come from the successful eyrie on a nearby moor owned by the National Trust, where just a few weeks before a nest of chicks fledged. High over the ridge in front of us, the unmistakeable shape and colour of a male hen harrier appeared.” He then goes on to describe how a pair of harriers were raising their chicks on the grouse moor and concludes with, “great credit goes to Geoff Eyre and the National Trust, on whose moor such wildlife flourishes.”

To that we can add the independent Peak District Breeding Bird survey, which showed that the RSPB were completely wrong to say that dunlin, lapwing and snipe were declining faster on the keepered Peak District moors than elsewhere. In fact the reverse was the case. According to the Breeding Bird Survey, “significant long term increases in breeding wader populations (lapwing, golden plover, curlew and snipe) contrast with national-scale declines” and “increasing sightings of ravens and raptors (buzzard, peregrine and kestrel) largely reflect national recovery from historically low levels”. They further point out that the Peak supports nationally important populations of short-eared owl and merlin and up to 2% of the nations ring ouzels.

These birds were doing better on keepered ground than elsewhere.

So, not only has the RSPB been attacking gamekeepers as a group ­– and remember that the UN says that a hate crime is “any communication that attacks or discriminates against a person or group based on their identity factors”. It is also clear that many of the attacks are at best exaggerated or unacceptably generalised; at worst they are simply wrong. If we want to be kind, far kinder than they are prepared to be, we might say that they were mistaken when they said things that were demonstrably untrue and prejudicial about a group based on their identity.

It is, however, difficult to believe that is the case. The RSPB own and manage lots of land in the Peak District. They go to every meeting. They say that they are the experts and know everything about everything in the Peak District. If that is the case, how could their spokesman claim not to know that Howden Moor was a conservation gem rather than a butcher’s shop?

So are the gamekeepers right to believe that the RSPB has been using hate speech against them? One test is to consider if any of their statements meet the criteria set by the UN that hate speech is “any communication that attacks or discriminates against a person or group based on their identity factors” or “speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership of a social group”. 

We would say that it is pretty obvious that on that basis the gamekeepers have a justified case. We think it is fairly clear that they are being attacked as a group based on their identity, and that the attacks are generalised, often exaggerated, and sometimes just plain false. We suspect that the RSPB would disagree. Such disagreements are the normal basis for intelligent debate.

But this is not normal. This is about an enormous, rich and powerful organisation deciding to remorselessly target a group of people who they, for whatever reason, justified or not, have decided must take the medicine they choose to dish out. If we do no more than apply the old Christian rule of doing onto others as you would be done by, they are on the wrong side by a substantial margin.