(posted 7090 days ago)Telegraph
Offending we will go, offending we will go...
Filed: 21/11/2004)After the bill to ban hunting was passed last week, Melissa Kite rode out with the Surrey Union Hunt at Effingham Hill Farm near Cobham where men in pink are brewing civic disobedience.
As the riders of the Surrey Union Hunt exchanged small talk beneath a pink November sky, there was little to suggest that this was anything other than a cordial social scene.
While impatient hooves crunched the frosty ground, the chatter was about last night's dinner party and plans for the weekend. And yet, as the 50 riders and professional huntsmen began Friday's meet at Effingham Hill Farm near Cobham, there were undercurrents of rebellion.
In the car park, men in red coats handed out flyers. The leaflets contained precise instructions for the actions to be taken in three months' time, when this social get-together will become a crime.
Until now, the ladies and gents of the Surrey Union have indulged in nothing more risky than a sip from a hip flask and a sneaky cigarette. (They also, of course, hurtle across open country on spirited mares.) However, when the hunting ban comes into force in February - barring a legal challenge or a stay of execution from Tony Blair - they will have a more serious pastime on their hands.
The leaflet, which is being distributed to hunts up and down the country, instructs members that when the ban comes into effect they should restyle themselves as "hound exercise" clubs in order to be able to pursue a legal activity that will permit their survival.
"On the first day of outlawed hunting individual followers may then get together, each taking charge of a hound or two, and overtly break the law by hunting forbidden quarry," it advises. "Should anyone be arrested then all others would come forward also to offer themselves for arrest. All would plead guilty in court and the hope is that as many as possible would refuse to pay fines and prefer to go to jail."
The leaflet counsels restraint and suggests that hunting people always co-operate with the police by turning themselves in. Violence is to be avoided "at all costs", it urges. "The aim is to ensure that a great many people obtain a criminal record, so that a future government will see the need to repeal the ban and rectify the injustice."
Like housewives during the Blitz, everyone in the polite crowd was ready to do their bit. The Surrey Union has swelled in numbers and many young people and metropolitan types are flocking to join. Karl Sessions, 28, from Kennington, south London, on his first hunt, said: "I don't think a ban is justified. I came to see hunting for myself before deciding. I think I will come again." Izzy Myers, 31, from Roehampton, south London, called it"a travesty".
Most at the hunt were determined to look on the bright side, many seeming unable to face the fact that the ban is now a reality. When a man in a Ford Escort wound down his window and shouted, "Only 90 days to go!", one young rider asked: "What does he mean?" Someone explained and he said: "Oh, the ban . . ."
Seven years after a private member's bill was introduced to end hunting with dogs, the ban was made law on Thursday. As this paper predicted last , it was a kamikaze move by peers that led to hunting being made illegal by February.
The Hunting Bill was forced through amid scenes of chaos and confusion, with the Lords wrecking a delaying motion that would have postponed it for 18 months. Their move dashed Tony Blair's last hope of avoiding full-scale civil disobedience by huntsmen in the run-up to a general election next spring.
Not before the motion proposing the delay had been flung between the two houses in a desperate round of ping pong, however. Ministers and their appointees tried every trick and ruse they could think of to have a ban, but not one that would come into force straight away.
In the end, seven years of impassioned campaigning by Labour MPs came down to a desperate wrangle between Commons and Lords clerks over whether the Government could force through a delay without the consent of peers. As the clerks danced on the head of a pin, ministers proposed a compromise delay until 2006.
Labour backbenchers yelled at Hilary Armstrong, the chief whip, in the Commons canteen: "We don't trust you. It's a trick." In a measure of the paranoia now rife on the Labour benches, they believed it was an attempt by the Prime Minister to invalidate and destroy his own Bill by the back door.
As the Commons lobbies reverberated to the deranged sound of clang after clang of division bell, the Labour MP Stephen Pound summed up the mood as he rushed past to vote on a series of baffling amendments: "Madness, pure madness."
When the Lords finally put the kibosh on the delay, Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, accused the Lords of being "like turkeys voting for Christmas". All that was left was for the Speaker to declare at 9.02pm that the Parliament Act was duly invoked, to cries of "shame" from the Tory benches and cheers from Labour.
By this time, hunt supporters were demonstrating outside Windsor Castle as Mr Blair met Jacques Chirac. The French President duly obliged the hunting lobby by declaring hunting "a fine sport". It was perhaps a foretaste of the embarrassment pro-hunters hope to inflict on Mr Blair in the weeks and months ahead.
Many had given up hope long ago that a way could be found to preserve the 300-year-old tradition, an industry worth £15 million a year that involves half a million people.
Only a few die-hard optimists in the Countryside Alliance were still insisting, as MPs began to debate the Bill on Tuesday, that Tony Blair would persuade enough Labour MPs to back a compromise and hand them a last reprieve. "We're still confident Mr Blair can do it," said one. By Tuesday night, when MPs had roundly rejected a compromise by 321 votes to 204, such optimism finally died away.
Everyone in the debate now agrees on one thing. The past two weeks have been more about pinning the blame than finding a solution. For his part, Mr Blair voted with the majority of Tory MPs for a licensed hunting compromise on Tuesday. But many saw it simply as an attempt to wash his hands of the ban, which was after all a Government bill. Others saw it as an example of pitiful weakness. Mr Blair's lead was ignored by six cabinet members and 50 other ministers who voted for abolition.
Ministers may introduce a separate one-line Bill in the next few weeks to delay the ban, but this will need the support of the Lords and cannot be subjected to the Parliament Act. Peers say they will not back it. "We buy huntsmen a little more time before we kill them and we let Blair off the hook," as one senior Tory put it.
As things are, Mr Blair could face deep embarrassment in the run-up to the election if hunting people mount demonstrations to rival the fuel protests that took place before the last election. It has also made it easier to challenge the Bill under human rights legislation, because the Joint Committee on Human Rights has ruled that the Bill is only compatible with EU law if it has an 18-month delay to allow huntsmen to prepare.
The Tory leadership does not share the view that hunting is a good election issue. They agree with Labour strategists that scenes involving angry landowners in green wellies will only motivate millions to support Tony Blair. The Prime Minister's own polling shows that 20 per cent of people are passionately against hunting, 10 per cent passionately in favour and 70 per cent are uninterested.
Michael Howard may question the wisdom of it, but hunting people are still preparing to do all they can to help Tories in marginal seats, even promising to put envelopes through doors for them.
A legal challenge to the use of the Parliament Act - the basis of which is the quaint inanity that the Parliament Act of 1949 was itself forced through using the Parliament Act of 1911, which it was replacing because it was invalid - has now begun. If successful, it could overturn not only the Hunting Act but all other legislation passed using the Act, including the War Crimes Act and the Sexual Offences Amendment Act, which lowered the age of consent to 16 for homosexuals.
Few believe that either this challenge or a separate human rights action using EU law will work. The Countryside Alliance admits privately that the main tactic now is to keep hunting going in some legal form so that it can one day be revived in its fox-killing guise.
"Sod the legal challenge," said one well-known hunting campaigner. "If we can keep up morale, that is more crucial than anything else. We need to keep ourselves going and then, whenever we get rid of this f***ing government, whether it is in six years or 11 years' time, we will still be there."
Until then, there is little the thousands of people whose jobs are at stake can do except to make life as difficult for Mr Blair as they can. As one hunt member put it: "They can ban hunting, but they can't ban us."