There continues to be something about hunting that encourages an epic loss of common sense from otherwise sane and reasonable people. An independent review, published yesterday, of Warwickshire Police’s decision to issue a Community Protection Notice (CPN) to the Warwickshire Hunt highlights exactly this phenomenon.
The story started when an officer from Warwickshire Police decided to issue a warning, then a CPN, to the hunt in December 2022 after complaints about obstruction of the highway. For the uninitiated, CPNs give the police powers to tackle anti-social behaviour in neighbourhoods. Apart from arguments as to whether horses on a road really have a detrimental effect on people’s quality of life, one of the many problems with the Warwickshire Hunt’s CPN was that it sought to define a whole county as a neighbourhood. On advice the hunt therefore appealed against the CPN which would otherwise have had a significant impact on its operations.
The review reveals that it was only at this stage that senior officers became aware of the decision to issue the CPN and after initial discussions in court and legal advice they took the wise decision not to oppose the appeal and instead negotiated an agreement with the Warwickshire Hunt as to its future operations. So far, the story was regrettable, but after the withdrawal of the CPN it became increasingly mad.
Animal rights extremists are obviously insane by definition and they created a conspiracy theory involving the hunt, the police, the Countryside Alliance and Police and Crime Commissioner Philip Seccombe who, like many elected politicians, has declared his interest as a member of ours. The allegation seemed to be that Mr Seccombe had withdrawn the CPN against the Warwickshire Hunt because we are a shadowy, powerful organisation which has PCCs and police officers at our beck and call.
The review, however, confirms that Mr Seccombe had nothing to do with the case at any stage, and that his membership of the Alliance had no impact on Warwickshire Police’s decisions. You would have thought that only the extremely gullible could be persuaded of such obvious nonsense, but Channel 4 news has returned endlessly to the story and local MP, Matt Western, went even further. He used parliamentary privilege which renders MPs immune from legal action to claim that the Alliance ‘provides financial support’ to Mr Seccombe, which is completely untrue.
We wrote to Mr Western asking him to apologise or repeat the allegation outside parliament so that we could take appropriate legal action. However, he declined to do either, so before Christmas I wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons to ask him to address this blatant abuse of parliamentary privilege. We will not let this lie, not only because it is baseless nonsense, but also because politicians and journalists alike need to learn to take extreme care before being dragged down the wormholes of animal rights conspiracy theories.