Spare the rod, spoil the wild | Tim Bonner

It is difficult to think of a modern British politician who is a fisherman. The last piscatorial Prime Minister was Alec Douglas-Home and the most famous political figure to cast a fly remains Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary who took Britain into the First World War and famously fished on the first morning of the Somme, although he did not know of the disaster unfolding across the channel. In America, by contrast, Presidents fish. Both Bushes were devoted, Jimmy Carter was an artist with a fly rod and Dwight Eisenhower fished wherever and whenever he could. Even Barack Obama cast for trout on a Montana stream.

This perhaps explains why JD Vance was able to declare victory over David Lammy after a morning’s carp fishing at the Foreign Secretary’s grace and favour residence Chevening House in Kent noting that “all of my kids caught fish, but the foreign secretary did not”. It does not, however, justify the Foreign Secretary’s ignorance of the law. As he has learned in the last few weeks, anglers contribute towards conservation and the environment in a way no other users of the countryside do, because a rod licence is required by law for anyone fishing in fresh water — even on a private lake. In 2024, over 900,000 people in England bought a rod licence, which raised over £22.5 million for the Environment Agency, the vast majority of which goes into maintaining rivers and lakes.

The Derbyshire ban highlights a growing opposition to the act of angling itself

For most of us the law is clear: if you fish without a licence, you will be prosecuted. In fact, the Environment Agency likes to boast that it will “always” prosecute. In this instance, however, a new category of retrospective licences was swiftly created to cover Mr Lammy’s embarrassment. It would be churlish to suggest that the full force of the law should be used to pursue the matter further. After all, it is nothing but a good thing that the Foreign Secretary took the Vice President and his family fishing, and the hiccup over licences will have revealed to an urban MP how much the angling community supports nature in a way that no other users of waterways or the countryside — whether wild swimmers, canoeists or ramblers — contribute.

Broadly, anglers think the rod licence is a good thing as it makes an indelible connection between fishing and conservation, but they are clearly not getting credit for either their financial or practical contribution to the environment. It is not just money that anglers contribute but also a huge amount of voluntary conservation work through local groups and national organisations like the Angling Trust, Fish Wild, the Wild Trout Trust and the Atlantic Salmon Trust. Fishermen also act as canaries in the coalmine where pollution threatens freshwater habitats. Long before politicians latched on to sewage pollution as a voter friendly issue, anglers were successfully suing polluters and campaigning for better regulation.

Even if our politicians do not fish (and it is noticeable that the long standing All-Party Parliamentary Group on Angling has not been reconstituted since the 2024 election), they do need to understand the contribution anglers make. If not, the shrill voices of a range of interest groups demanding access to rivers and lakes, alternative management of freshwater habitats and the recognition of the rights of fish will be uncontested.

At the same time as the Foreign Secretary’s fishing expedition was being reported, another story, involving the Labour-run North East Derbyshire District Council, which has implemented a de facto ban on angling at the Wingerworth Lido, near Chesterfield, was also in the news. The lake has been a hub for local anglers for decades, but the council has refused to renew a five-year licence. It claimed that the ban was “a vital step in promoting the area as a biodiversity hub — a safe space for wildlife to thrive”. It is difficult to overstate what utter nonsense that statement is. Anglers were creating and conserving “biodiversity hubs” before anyone came up with that pretentious description. Visit any fishery from the mighty salmon rivers of Scotland, to restored gravel pits in the Midlands, remote upland lakes in Wales or Hampshire’s stunning chalk streams and you will find pristine habitats protected and preserved by anglers and supporting wildlife of every kind.

As the row over Wingerworth Lido has developed it has become increasingly obvious that the council’s refusal to renew a licence for fishing is nothing to do with “biodiversity”, but a politically motivated attack on the activity of fishing. The council has even tried to justify a ban on the basis that people were complaining about anglers, a fiction that was rapidly exposed when it was challenged. 

Whatever the eventual outcome of the Derbyshire fishing ban (and there is a strong campaign to overturn the council’s decision), this move against fishing highlights a growing opposition to the act of angling itself. Most recently the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission, a statutory body which provides scientific and ethical advice on the welfare of animals to the Scottish Government produced a report entitled: “Ascribing sentience to fish: potential policy implications”. It concluded that: “In both freshwater and sea angling, fish are vulnerable to exposure to painful situations or other impacts on welfare status including injury, stress and mortality. Negative welfare arises from multiple aspects including tissue trauma from hooks, abrasions and stress from nets, injury from the use of gaffs to control larger fish, stress from capture, handling and exposure to air and a failure to provide a swift and humane method of killing”.

The committee was particularly concerned with the practice of “catch and release” angling which avoids killing fish and is very much the norm amongst freshwater anglers. The report concludes that “catch-and-release angling can lead to the injuring of sentient animals” and that the practice “should be given further consideration by the sports’ governing bodies and associations, in consultation with fish welfare experts”.

Students of the animal rights movement and the more controversial forays of politics into supposed animal welfare legislation will already be smelling a rat, rather than a fish. This is exactly the sort of language that has been used to justify bans and prohibitions on a range of other activities involving animals. The Americans might have enough supportive politicians to keep banning fishing off their political agenda, but anglers in the UK may soon be ruing our failure to educate or interest the British political classes in the gentle art of angling and all the benefits that flow from it.