Who will win the Angling Vote?

Not so long ago it was a foregone conclusion as to which party most people were going to vote for.

You voted for the party that your dad supported, which if you were working-class meant Labour; Liberal if you were engaged in teaching or were unsure who to vote for; or Conservative if you were aspiring middle-class or rich or titled.

Nowadays it’s a whole lot more difficult with every party trying to take the ‘middle ground’ and unashamedly pinching each others policies.

With all parties adopting similar policies on the ‘big issues’, and with many constituencies increasingly becoming wavering marginals it’s the vote of special interest groups, particularly large special interest groups that are becoming increasing important.

And with millions of people involved in angling, spanning all socio-economic groups (but largely from the traditional Labour camp) politicians are beginning to realise that the ‘angling vote’ is worth fighting for.

“It’s not about the science, or the economics, or even about ethics, it’s all about politics” is a truism that those campaigning for a better deal for the UK’s anglers are also beginning to understand.

With more and more anglers taking the trouble to write and talk to their MPs the first shots in the battle for the angling vote are beginning to be fired within Parliament.

That is evidenced by the number of Parliamentary questions now being raised on behalf of anglers by their MPs.

And the annual Fisheries Debate in Parliament, once concerned solely with issues regarding the commercial fishing sector, is increasingly being used by politicians from all parties to parade their angling credentials.

Yet it’s not just about convincing the politicians.  

The machinery of government has long seen itself as regulating, managing and serving the long term interests of the commercial fishing lobby, and it is finding it difficult to adapt its long established culture and mindset to the new political realities, both consciously and sub-consciously.

The way that it is supposed to work is that politicians listen to the will of the people, formulate policies and instruct the civil servants to deliver.

Yet anyone who has watched ‘Yes Minister’ and who has dealt with the Civil Service, will have a more cynical view, seeing the aspirations of politicians to deliver policies frustrated and undermined by their supposedly politically neutral ‘advisors’.

So, the warm words within Labour’s ‘Angling Charters’ preceding previous election campaigns, fail to materialise in delivered policy, drowned in a morass of consultation, reports, more consultation and finally lost or side-tracked down avenues that the Government never really intended, and which certainly will not please those millions of voting anglers.  

And yet the same Civil Service repeatedly demonstrates that it is able to respond with agility to threats to the interests of its traditional ‘stake-holder’ community.

In the past, the post of Fisheries Minister has been politically unimportant, indeed the number of other duties within DEFRA that the junior minister has to deal with makes it difficult for the minister to give his full attention to the many issues within fisheries that have to be grappled with, increasing his/her reliance upon the advice of his/her Civil Servants.   And few can have failed to realise that the current incumbent is also Minister for the South-East, which has to be an enormous job in itself, on top of the normal constituency work of an MP.

But with the ‘new politics’ and the growing importance of the ‘angling vote’ in a political world where there is not much political ground left to fight over, it could well be that the policy decisions that the Fisheries Minister leaves to his Civil Servants, could well clinch victory or defeat within the General Election that lies not too far down the road.  

And that fact has not escaped the notice of opportunistic opposition parties.

Never has it been more important for anglers to engage with their MPs, to drive home the fact that there are millions of us, and the simple fact that ‘We Fish, and We Vote!’

(To contact your own MP, visit http://www.theyworkforyou.com. It’s important that he/she knows what is important to you, and what will decide your future vote.)