Labour’s fallacious fox hunting battle

Boxing Day: a time for gifts, shopping and fox hunting – traditionally on horse back, unless you’re Jolyon Maugham KC. These days of course, the actual hunt is nothing more than trail hunting, with hounds following a scent-based trail rather than live animals. But for some in Keir Starmer’s new-fangled Labour party, even that goes too far.

Jim McMahon, the baby-faced Shadow Environment Secretary, clearly smells an opportunity here. He is reported in the Guardian (where else?) as suggesting that trail hunting is little more than a ‘smokescreen’ for illegal activity and a loophole of the 2004 Hunting Act, which banned hunting wild mammals with dogs in England and Wales. As proof of this Labour point to figures which show that some 438 convictions for hunting have been secured since 2010. ‘Labour is the party of animal welfare,’ harrumphs McMahon ‘and in government we will go further to protect animal welfare by putting an end to trail hunting.