Countryside Alliance - love the countryside

Tony Blair’s reputation for not being wholly wedded to the truth has been supported by more important evidence than his behaviour over the Hunting Act, but that issue and his re-writing of history in his memoir ‘A Journey’ typifies his delusion. In it he says that the hunting ban is “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret”, but claims he ensured that the Hunting Act was “a masterly British compromise” that left enough loopholes to allow hunting to continue “provided certain steps were taken to avoid cruelty when the fox is killed.”

You may have seen that the League Against Cruel Sports has this week launched what it calls a "public education campaign" to "see off" the campaign for repeal. In launching this latest drive there were the usual claims about the success of the Act and the high conviction rate - read a news story in the Western Daily Press here. The truth is somewhat different. It took £30 million to get the Hunting Act onto the Statute Book in the first place - the League was central to this, yet it still got things wrong and is now trying to justify its position.

In an extraordinary admission League Against Cruel Sports (LACS) Chief Executive Douglas Batchelor has explicitly accepted that it is impossible to support the argument that hunting is cruel. Commenting on the appointment of Lord Donoughue as Chair of the Hunting Regulatory Authority and his proposal for a law to outlaw cruelty to wild mammals Mr Batchelor said: “Lord Donoughue is apparently planning to put forward some sort of Private Members Bill in the House of Lords which would make it an offence to be cruel to a wild mammal. The problem with that suggestion is that someone would actually have to be cruel to the animal before they could be charged with any offence.”