If you actually wanted to create a law that would genuinely transform animal welfare in the UK, the sane approach would be to follow the example of the organisation Compassion in World Farming. They call for farming practices that ‘enable animals to engage in their natural behaviours as identified by scientific research’ (not that we need much scientific research to know what makes chickens and pigs happy). We would then have to pay and protect farmers to provide that kind of husbandry. It would be a very big, very expensive ask. But the government has other priorities.
It has been reported this weekend that Labour is all set to ban trail hunting. In other words, it wants to outlaw an activity that is specifically designed not to chase and kill animals, by providing hounds with a fake trail laid with fox urine.
The government, with that unerring instinct for identifying activities that might be enjoyed by people they don’t identify with, has decided that trail hunting is actually a ‘smokescreen’ for foxhunting. In April, the anti-hunting group the League Against Cruel Sports said that it had recorded nearly 1,600 incidents, including 397 reports of foxes being chased, during the previous season – these days it uses drones to keep track of hunters.
Look, in the great scheme of things, given what happens in intensive agriculture systems, 397 foxes being chased in a season really does not matter a damn. It actually doesn’t. This is a whopping distraction, a massive waste of time, the contemporary equivalent of those Puritans who, Lord Macaulay observed, hated bear baiting, not on account of the pain to the bear but the pleasure afforded to the spectators. That’s modern Labour for you. If I were one of those Labour MPs who somehow won a rural constituency on the back of the country getting shot of the Tories last time, I would be making plans for life outside parliament after the next election. Still, their days were numbered after inheritance tax was extended to farms.
The stuff about trail hunting being a ‘smokescreen’ comes from the senior policeman with responsibility for fox hunting in the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Assistant Chief Constable Longman. Is it just me, or does it seem like a waste to have a senior policeman focusing on stuff that only matters to complete obsessives? But that’s the consequence of the fox hunting ban – it created crime that the police are obliged to follow up.
I don’t have, as it were, a dog in this fight, not even the smallest terrier; I have never hunted. But this is what you get with Labour, at least the current crop. You can’t imagine Blue Labour wasting time over criminalising activity that has nothing to do with normal people’s preoccupations. But it has quite a lot to do with keeping on side the young female vegans who worry about their mental health and are going over to the Greens in their thousands.
More than that, it’s one of those issues that follows a Labour government like a kind of miasma. You might think when you vote for the party, you’re voting for decent public services, the renationalisation of the railways, better social care, an equitable tax system, getting rid of the Tories… whatever. But beyond the obvious policies, there’s always the broad agenda, the kind of thing cooked up over decades in conference fringe meetings by activists whose real home should be in Your Party. Labour voters may not have intended to install a government which is all at sea about what a woman is, but that’s what they got. They may not have intended to vote for assisted suicide, but it’s what their Labour MP was likely to vote for (no disrespect to those who didn’t). They almost certainly didn’t vote to decriminalise abortion up to birth, a disgusting measure supported overwhelmingly by Labour members. And they definitely didn’t vote to try to fudge the rape gang inquiry. Yet a party with a mandate that was almost entirely negative – it was based on Labour being any other party than the Tories – gets to transform the social infrastructure of England and Wales. (Scotland has already gone all Nicola Sturgeon on this issue – do read her memoir for her justification for SNP MPs voting on foxhunting in England.) In the case of trail hunting, this is a manifesto commitment, so if voters didn’t read the small print, well, they can’t blame the party.
Let’s see how long it takes for Labour’s massive majority to railroad this stupid measure through parliament. It took 700 hours of debate to pass the ban on foxhunting. This will take less time. But it is still an utter waste of energy and a distraction from measures that might actually help more animals than 397 bloody foxes.
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