Does your candidate back your sport?

As campaigning for the forthcoming General Election entered its second week, BASC has made a call on shooters to contact their local candidates to establish their views on shooting issues.

In January, BASC launched an online campaign to ascertain the views of different parties’ candidates and to question them on their support for shooting. The association has compiled a wide-ranging snapshot of the main parties’ support, which it has published on its website. However, as campaigning steps up in earnest in advance of the 6 May polling day, shooters have the opportunity to register the views of local candidates who haven’t declared their position on shooting using BASC’s online campaign tool at www.basc.org.uk. This allows shooters to email candidates directly, and to feed their responses back into BASC’s database for the benefit of all voters with an interest in the sport.

Before the election was formally announced last week, a significant proportion of all prospective candidates — around 20 per cent in total — had responded to BASC, with the overwhelming majority of responses being either supportive or neutral on shooting sports. Responses have particularly been forthcoming from rural constituencies, meaning voters in traditional shooting areas already have a better likelihood of discovering their local candidates’ views.

The rest of this article appears in 14th April issue of Shooting Times.

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