Boxing Day saw reports of huge support for hunts up and down the country. Pictures of crowds gathering to greet hounds and hunts from Cornwall to Cumbria were sent to us and many are now on our social media.
Meanwhile, we also used the opportunity to hammer home the message that the new government’s commitment to ‘ban trail hunting’ was unjustified, out of touch with voters' priorities and another attack on the countryside. Alliance spokespeople appeared on GB News, Sky, ITV and many other media outlets sharing the enjoyment of Boxing Day meets and pushing back against the government’s agenda.
Polling we commissioned from ORB showed that hunting is nowhere in the list of issues people think the government should be addressing and far less important to them than policy on issues like inheritance tax, solar farms, mobile phone coverage or shoplifting. We also asked about Keir Starmer’s commitment to ‘restore the bond of trust between Labour and the countryside’. Over half (54%) of people thought he was performing poorly, rising to 66% for those living in the countryside. This will not go unnoticed by the many Labour MPs elected in marginal rural constituencies in July and the Daily Express has written a full write up.
The government’s response could be best described as muted. Defra sources confirmed to The Telegraph that the proposal to ‘ban trail hunting’ would include adding recklessness to the offence, banning the use of animal-based scents and increasing penalties. Custodial sentences, however, seem to have been ruled out which is not entirely surprising given the prison crisis. Proposing to lock up trail hunters whilst granting early release to violent criminals would be more than challenging to justify. This morning The Times reports “sources close to Steve Reed the environment secretary” as saying that trail hunting legislation was “not a priority” for the government, that it was not in the King’s Speech and that no proposals had yet gone to ministers.
This suggests that we will not see legislation until at the very earliest the end of next year, and more likely in 2026. In the meantime, the Alliance will continue to engage with ministers to challenge the need for any changes to the Hunting Act at all and to ensure that they understand the real-life impact of any proposals that they are considering.
At the same time the hunting community needs to redouble its efforts to ensure that the case for new legislation is non-existent. The government continues to claim that trail hunting is being “exploited as a smokescreen to cruelly kill foxes”. Anti-hunting groups support that argument with concocted allegations of illegal hunting. There is only one way to address such claims and that is for hunts to show unarguably that they are operating legally and legitimately. That removes the last shred of justification for legislation and will put the government in an even more indefensible position. The Alliance will always fight the political and PR battles, but much of hunting’s future lies in its own hands.