The next big hunting battle

In his memoirs, Tony Blair did not have much good to say about his government’s seven-year long struggle to ban fox hunting. The former PM, writing in 2010, admitted he deliberately sabotaged the 2004 Hunting Act to ensure there were enough loopholes to allow hunting to continue. Confessing that he initially agreed to a ban without properly understanding the issue, Blair wrote: ‘If I’d proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I’d have got less trouble. By the end of it, I felt like the damn fox.’

Yet while the Act applies to England and Wales – with similar legislation passed in Scotland in 2002 – no such ban exists in Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK where fox-hunting with hounds is still legal. However, all that could be about to change, thanks to another left-of-centre politician by the name of Blair: John Blair, a Stormont Assembly member proposing a private members’ bill to ban the practice.