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Hunting is cool. Ten years ago no one in her right mind would have dreamed of writing a novel about hunting, but now Candida Clark has done exactly that. Just as George Bush’s ‘war of terror’ gave a huge boost to al-Q’aeda, so Labour’s attempt to impose a ban has actually invigorated hunting. Today it’s more popular than ever, given an extra shot of adrenalin by the thrill of dodging the law.
Parliament spent 700 hours debating hunting, and the result was a botched and unworkable law which makes things worse, not better, for the fox. The reason for this fiasco is simple. As Charlie Pye-Smith explains in his excellent essay, Rural Rites, the ban was driven by class war, not by a concern for animal welfare. ‘For most of the MPs who voted for a ban it was all about pay-back time for the miners,’ says pro-hunting Labour peer Llin Golding. Pye-Smith is fascinating on the politics of the 2005 Hunting Act. Tony Blair and Alun Michael, the minister in charge of the bill, were not in favour of a ban. Both preferred ‘licensed hunting’, which was the policy of the Middle Way Group, who have published this pamphlet. This was also the conclusion of the Burns Committee which the Government had set up. The ban was the work of Gerald Kauffman and his friend the late Tony Banks, for whom animal welfare was a Trojan horse — a way of avenging the miners’ strike by attacking the Tory classes. The unintended and tragic consequence was that foxes were left far less protected than before.
Labour MPs voted for a ban out of bigotry. They were ignorant about hunting but paid no attention to the debates because they had already made up their minds.
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