I cannot agree with generalised BASC-bashing. After all, they have put out very clear advice on this - don't pay; you don't need to, because in the vast majority of cases in England and wales, your application will proceed by default even without a GP response. It is individual applicants who are ignoring the advice!
BASC has more members than all other orgs put together, and unlike them it has shown continued growth over past 18 months, being at an all time high. Shooters, it seems are choosing BASC in preference to other orgs, even those that charge less. (My own feeling, incidentally, is that they all have a role to play, and should work together.)
I can only say that the BASC firearms staff I have come across are extremely helpful and professional. And this is the only org that even has a full time firearms dept, remember. They handle huge amounts of queries every day. No other org does that, or could do that.
However, I do seem to recall that at the time all this medical/licensing stuff was being negotiated, BASC was in the grip of the Ali regime, and he selected Curtis (a former senior North Wales police officer who had previously been ordered to resign from his job in Kosovo by the UN commissioner, and who more recently lost his employment tribunal case against BASC) and put him in overall charge of firearms at the org. Curtis in turn hired one of his former N Wales colleagues (a non-shooter, would you believe?) and put him in direct control of the firearms dept at that time. Were these particular senior people really on our side? Fortunately, they are now all gone. But are we still dealing with their legacy? Perhaps I am leaping to conclusions. But I do sometimes wonder.
Anyway, for whatever reason, we are where we are. Some of the ongoing problems seems to lie in the fragmentation of the UK political and licensing structure (Westminster, Holyrood, IoM, etc), the absence of a representative body for GPs, and the consequent ignoring of Home Office official guidance by Lincolnshire GPs /police. This effectively enables us to be divided and bashed. And given that a substantial numbers of applicants steadfastly ignore BASC advice and pay, some might say we are the authors of our own misfortune.
Lincolnshire, mind you, certainly need a legal handbagging - but we have to be careful this doesn't have unintended consequences (eg the Lincs system being imposed as a national standard).
As for Scotland, well, what happens there tends to be used as a precedent by our opponents more widely, and I cannot fathom how or why Police Scotland was allowed to row its own canoe on this without stiffer resistance. What we do about it now, I 'm afraid, I just don't know. In my darker moments, I see the Scottish system being spread to the rest of the UK. But then, with so many applicants apparently paying their GPs for the initial scan, how can we present a united front?
