How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [7]
Unfortunately, however, this case isn’t quite as clear-cut as you might imagine. You see, Cannon is painted as a ghastly man who was caught in the nick of time, just before he carpeted the entire estate in inch-thick shagpile and fitted it with dimmer switches. In fact, having paid £4m for the moor, he invested a further £3m on improving the quality of the heather, which he describes as being more important than the rainforest. He employed more keepers, worked with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and built a small number of gravel tracks so vehicles could reach peatier parts of the estate without sinking.
The government agents talk about 4,433 square metres being buried under aggregate. This sounds like a huge amount, but in fact it’s just over 1 acre. A small sacrifice when it does so much to improve the 2,999 others. The fact is that since Cannon took over, the number of rare black grouse on his land has jumped from four to 150. And last year on the estate the bag was 16,054 birds, the biggest number since 1872.
And there’s your problem. Government agents have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. They simply noted the site was of special scientific interest, observed that tracks had been made and drainage ditches installed and, using their tiny bri-nylon minds along with a bottomless pit of government money, reckoned that this was a crime against the moorhen.
These are the people who ran about screaming when I was on television recently driving up a mountain in Scotland. ‘You’ve ruined it,’ they yelled, perhaps not realizing that a three-ton car cannot possibly dent a 20-trillion-ton lump of solid granite. ‘But you’ve squashed the heather,’ they whimpered. Yes, but if you knew anything at all about the countryside, you’d know that heather is burnt every so often to encourage new growth, which provides food for birdlife using the old woody heather as cover.
I face a similar set of problems in the Isle of Man, where I have a small piece of land. It’s listed as a site of special scientific interest, which means I must harvest the crops from the inside of the field outwards and use sheep to keep the grass down. I am willing to do this. I am also willing to avoid fertilizer, which means my turnips look like conkers and my barley is the colour of a U-boat.
But then I am told I must also allow people to go out there with their dogs, which chase the sheep into the sea and leave so much shit around the place that it scares away the birds I’m trying to attract with my DDT-free crops and escape-route harvesting techniques. That’s the trouble with environmentalists. Their love of wildlife is almost always outweighed by their hatred of the rich. They think that anyone with a Range Rover and a few quid in the bank must have earned that money by pumping polonium into the ozone layer and beating tramps to death with baby ospreys for sexual kicks. They therefore assume that he or she will view the countryside as nothing more than a site for a factory that can pick up the baton dropped by the people at Bhopal.
The most worrying thing about the Cannon case, though, leaving aside the large fine and costs, is the system that allows blinkered busybodies to poke about in someone else’s garden. They are using legislation brought in to prevent fly-tipping, badger-baiting and the theft of rare birds’ eggs – which is laudable – to prosecute someone for damaging their own property. Technically this means they could come round to my house and prosecute my children for damaging the grade I & II-listed kitchen door. And you know what? Now I’ve fessed up they probably will.
But will they arrest someone for paving over their front lawn or replacing the front hedge with a horrid wall made from upended crazy paving? No? Why not? This Jewsonization of the suburbs causes