The new season: a time for confidence

How the land lies at the season’s start, as seen by Lord Mancroft.

DESPITE the ban on hunting, most of the prospect pleases: Hunts thrive, subscriber waiting lists lengthen, hound breeding and staff recruitment return to normal. Political indicators are optimistic as the chance of a Labour victory at the next General Election diminishes. All in all, the view is bright. So now, hack on!

As another season opens, this is a good time to take a long, hard look at where the politics of hunting have reached. The answer, as always in politics, is not entirely straightforward, but a rapid stock-take of the current position, followed by a brave forward cast, may well give rise to cautious optimism.

At the risk of stating the obvious, nobody expected us to be where we are today. Hunting as we have known it was banned three seasons ago. We expected Hunts to fail, hounds to be put down, and our world to turn upside down. No Hunts have failed, no hounds were put down (although far fewer were bred), few Hunt staff lost their jobs or homes, and our world did not collapse. In fact, the reverse is more accurate.

Hunts which bred fewer hounds are regretting it and desperately breeding more, those which shed staff have largely re-hired them, and, perhaps more importantly than any detail, hunting is enjoying a renaissance, with many packs recruiting new followers—on horse, on foot and by car—in unprecedented numbers. Some Hunts even have waiting-lists as never before.

The antis have smugly announced that this is because we are no longer hunting live quarry—and of course they know best. But because we are apparently no longer hunting live quarry, those same antis have little left to oppose. The RSPCA’s news pamphlets no longer contain seemingly limitlesss anti-hunting propaganda, and its officials do anything to avoid mention of hunting (I see them sometimes at Westminster: they know the truth, but nothing will make them face it). The League Against Cruel Sports has sold its London headquarters, made many of its staff redundant, and even sold the property at its Exmoor ‘deer sanctuary’ at Baronsdown, arguably its ‘flagship operation’. Whether this is because the League is running out of money, or because the whole idea of ‘sanctuaries’ has become discredited in a mire of accusations of mismanagement amounting to cruelty, is unclear: either way, that particular game is now over.

Indeed, the whole politics of animal rights has completely changed since the ban. Animal rights is an intellectual, if wholly illogical concept, but the ban on hunting never had intellectual integrity. It was based, rather, on an emotional view of animals, and more importantly, an emotional view of politics, centred on class warfare, and, to a lesser extent on the perceived divide between town and country. But hunting is now banned: so why would anybody contribute either time or money to a cause that has already achieved its objective?

The answer is that they would not, and they do not. Class warfare is of virtually no interest to most people in Britain, and the remaining class warriors within the Labour Party are few, and rapidly heading for retirement and political oblivion. Gerald Kaufman may be the ‘grand dame’ of the Left, but he no longer has influence; Tony Banks is dead; Martin Salter will lose his seat; and Gordon Prentice, smelling the mood, lost interest a long time ago.

And the mood is all-important. When we hunting people were all asleep, and enjoying our sport in the 1980s, the animal rights movement was busy infiltrating the Labour movement. By the 1990s, virtually every Labour constituency executive committee had at least one member from the animal rights movement. He was the one who always turned up for committee meetings, who always volunteered for the jobs nobody else wanted to do. Slowly but surely, they bought and then owned more and more Labour candidates and MPs, so that after the 1997 General Election animal rights was central to the New Labour mission.

Curiously, this meant little if anything to the then leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair himself, but perhaps that was because he was never truly Labour. He was only ever interested in himself, and would happily have led any major Party that would have him. Nor has it any resonance for his successor Gordon Brown, partly, I suspect, because he is from Scotland, where hunting was never a major issue, partly because his towering intellect operates far above irrelevant issues such as hunting—and also because, as we now know, he has no political judgment, even in respect of his own Party and its moods.

Earlier this year, Paddy Tipping, an old Labour MP who has never amounted to much, wasted one of his few chances to ask the Prime Minister a question by making a demand for the Government to do more to ensure that the Police enforce the Hunting Act, and to reject David Cameron’s pledge to reverse the ban. Brown ducked both issues, saying nothing about policing—and thus accepting the reality—and merely opining that the House of Commons had already decided the matter (despite the fact that he has never felt the need to vote either way on hunting in his entire parliamentary career). In other words, Tipping’s Question was of no consequence, and the Prime Minister’s answer was of even less. Perhaps more significantly, in a House of Commons that would have reverberated to the shouts of support a few years ago, there was only indifference, silence, even embarrassment. Miss Ann Widdecombe’s belated contribution did little to dispel her dinosaur status.

The time has passed. The animal rights movement no longer owns the Labour Party, and most Labour candidates do not waste time thinking about hunting. Many Labour MPs would not admit it, but they are embarrassed about the way they behaved, the time they wasted, and how silly they now look. After the ban, hunting people sloped about the country quietly and with trepidation. Last year they were less guarded, and people talked of complacence, rightly warning Masters to take care.

This year, despite sensible precautions, everybody knows the truth and few pretend otherwise. The hunting ban is a national farce and a massive political failure. The infrastructure of hunting has survived virtually intact—though not everybody is having it easy, and antis are still an unpleasant nuisance in the West Country and elsewhere. The League has almost entirely collapsed. Added to which, early this month, another significant change occurred.

After an unprecedented slump in support for the Government, the Conservatives made massive gains in the local elections, and Boris Johnson, a Tory supporter of hunting, became the second most powerful politician in Britain as Mayor of London. The Conservative Party is currently more than 20% ahead in the polls, with a leader pledged to provide a free vote on hunting in the House of Commons. On top of this, the Countryside Alliance believes that hunting has stronger support among Conservative parliamentary candidates than at any time since 1979. Of course, mayors can get into trouble, poll leads can evaporate, incoming Prime Ministers have a tendency to drop uncomfortable pledges, and events can change the political climate quickly and in ways we cannot imagine. So there is still much work to be done, and a mountain to climb, before we can blow hounds away with complete confidence.