The time to act is now

With Labour odds-on to win the next election, the Countryside Alliance launches a vital call to arms to protect hunt staff, hounds and hunting itself

- TIM BONNER

THE FIRST bill to ban hunting with dogs was put before Parliament in 1948. For 56 years groups of fixated MPs pursued their quarry relentlessly and finally, in 2004, the infamous Hunting Act was passed. The stubborn and brilliant defence carried out by the Countryside Alliance and its predecessor the British Field Sports Society (BFSS), not forgetting the hunting community as a whole for half a century, did not stop when the new law came into force. Despite all the difficulties presented by the Act, not to mention the additional challenges of operating any pack of hounds in our shrinking and increasingly crowded countryside, hunts refused to fold and found a way of operating under the new law.

This created a real problem for the animal-rights movement and the political Left, which had argued for the ban on the spurious basis that it would improve animal welfare but was, in fact, driven as least as much by its prejudice against the hunting community. For reasons that have never really been clear, hunting was long ago adopted by the Left as the symbol of Tory England and, as one of its great opponents Tony (later Lord) Banks put it, “a totemic issue for the Labour Party”.

Like any addicts, some within the Labour Party have found it impossible to drop their habit and while hunts continue to exist seem unable to remove hunting from their political priorities. So even as Sir Keir Starmer has sought to detoxify the party in many other areas, hunting has remained firmly on Labour’s agenda.