I promised myself years ago that I would never again write about the prospects for unity in angling. The next time I wrote about discussions among angling’s disparate bodies on the value of forming a single, coherent organisation would, I told myself, be only when the deed had been done.

Not until they had set aside the differences that have ruined all previous attempts to coalesce, only when they had gathered on that broad, sunlit upland where unity lives and had been there — oh, I don’t know — a good ten minutes without falling out, would I write about the subject again.

And yet here I am, reporting moves instigated by the sport’s lobbying arm, the Salmon & Trout Association (S&TA)) and its pollution-fighting arm, the Anglers’ Conservation Association (ACA), to try to make a full merger happen. Why? Mostly because this time I believe that there is a chance of success, partly because this issue is too important to leave alone.

The world around angling — social, political, environmental and economic — has changed beyond recognition in the past 30 years. In that time there have been numerous attempts to come to grip with these changes, most importantly by developing a single voice on important issues — but all have foundered on the narrow self-interest of the organisations and individuals involved.

The National Anglers’ Council withered in the 1980s. The Joint Angling Governing Bodies flickered and died in the 1990s. The National Angling Alliance was little more than stillborn around the millennium. The Fisheries and Angling Conservation Trust (FACT), launched to many trumpets in 2004, is still with us, but while providing a useful forum, it has not delivered the unity that was promised. Too many cooks have ruined that broth.

Now, it is clear, the S&TA, led by Paul Knight, the director, and the ACA under Mark Lloyd, its director, are bent on a merger. So is the National Association of Fisheries and Angling Consultatives (NAFAC). The National Federation of Sea Anglers will probably follow suit. Among the larger organisations, only the National Federation of Anglers (NFA) can be expected to drag its feet, but, given that body’s ever-increasing irrelevance to the wider angling community, even a decision not to join would be no loss.

In the run-up to their respective annual meetings over the next few weeks, the larger bodies and some of the smaller will be canvassing their members. If clearly supported by majorities — and early feedback is said to be heavily in favour in most — resolutions proposing a merger will be put to the vote by each.

If those annual meeting votes go through — NAFAC’s already has — the various executives will be empowered to finalise detail. Thereafter, the individual organisations would be wound up and the new body would take over. A target date of June 30 has been set for sign-up and the business of merging would begin at once.

It will be no easy task to finalise a constitution, a structure and a modus operandi that can deliver common goals while meeting individual groups’ core needs, but that is what will be required. Egos will need to be set aside. A few babies will go out with the bath-water.

And yet a merger has to be made to happen and, in the leaderships of S&TA, the ACA, NAFAC and the NFSA, there are those who have the vision to make it happen and who want to make it happen.

Angling’s inability to create a single, effective organisation has cost it dear. Over the years, abstraction and diffuse pollution have profoundly eroded biodiversity in general and fish life, bug life and plant life in particular. Influence with the Environment Agency has been less than it should have been. Government funding opportunities have been allowed to go begging. No adequate response has been put together against the forces that have taken on hunting and that are looking for new targets.

Time after time on critical issues, angling has been wrong-footed by events and opponents because an agreed position could not be adopted in time to influence the debate. At one point the Countryside Alliance, with its wider and contentious agenda, was allowed to fill the vacuum, sometimes disastrously.

If a merger can be agreed — and the NFA should not be allowed to delay one — all of those shortcomings could be addressed, duplication of effort could be eliminated and economies of scale achieved. Teams could be put together that would enable negotiations with organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and others — bodies with which angling shares many common interests — to be conducted on a more equal footing. Plans to tackle two overriding needs could be put in place — the first to increase membership and the second to build a truly effective public-relations machine focused on maintaining public support and countering the propaganda of animal rights extremists.

The sheer significance of what may be about to happen cannot be overstated. For bodies such as the S&TA — it has been in existence 105 years — the ACA, the NFSA and others to contemplate winding themselves up is a huge decision. But it is in the interests of all anglers that they do so and that this single new entity emerges. It matters not a jot who is sitting in which chair when the music stops, simply that unity happens, that it addresses the real issues and that it does so on behalf of the sport as a whole.

It is time this sleeping giant among field sports woke up. Its collective leadership has dozed through the alarm bells too long.

Brian Clarke’s angling column appears on the first Monday of each month.

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