If this is a debate about animal welfare, we must repeal the Hunting Act and start again

Today marks ten years of a ban on hunting a wild mammal with hounds in England and Wales, except under certain exemptions. To understand what a fundamentally bad law the Hunting Act is, and why it must be repealed, it is best to start at the beginning with the original purpose of the ban.

For all the talk of animal welfare the long battle over hunting legislation was not predominantly about foxes or other mammal species it was about class, politics and a gratuitous misrepresentation of hunting and the people who do it. This is not my interpretation, but the reality as admitted by many of those who promoted the ban.

Peter Bradley, then Labour MP for The Wrekin, said shortly after the Act came into force: ‘Now that hunting has been banned, we ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over the Bill was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom, it was class war’.