Tim Bonner: Does Labour want a battle over hunting?

Politics, like Ernest Hemmingway’s bankruptcy, happens gradually then suddenly. The cycle of electoral rise and fall sometimes stalls at a point where politicians sometimes fool themselves into thinking that they can break the mould, but when Gordon Brown declared an end to ‘boom and bust’ or the Conservatives called themselves ‘the natural party of government’, you knew that things were about to start happening suddenly. In the end politics is about expectation, and in the long term it is almost impossible for any political party to meet the expectations it must raise in order to get elected. Barack Obama campaigned on the slogan ‘Hope and Change’, but he was lucky to be restricted to serving eight years as President by the US constitution. Even he might have struggled in Gordon Brown or Rishi Sunak’s shoes leading parties that had already been in power for over a decade with no-one else to blame for anything, other than themselves.

That is why we reach the beginning of an election year just four years after the Conservatives were returned with a huge majority and Labour long odds-on favourites to form the next government. It is also why the Alliance has been working since long before the last election to influence Labour’s approach to the countryside. The election is certainly not a foregone conclusion, and we continue to have a positive dialogue with the current government and are engaged with the Liberal Democrat rural policy team. The likelihood is, however, that Labour will form the next government and on rural issues, in particular, it faces a fundamental choice. Labour admitted our critique that it replaced the priorities of the countryside with those of the animal rights movement and urban left told ‘an honest story about how Labour retreated from rural communities’. It has quietly moved away from the more contentious elements of its rural agenda under Jeremy Corbyn, including a ‘right to roam’ and restrictions on shooting. However, the shadow of New Labour and especially the saga of the Hunting Act hung over every attempt by Keir Starmer to attract the rural vote, even before Lord Mandelson’s recent revelations about the £1 million bribe that secured the hunting ban.

It is hard to credit it now but, until the invasion of Iraq, hunting was the single most divisive issue of the New Labour years, and that from a party which based its whole brand on an inclusive ‘third way’ philosophy. Hundreds of thousands of us marched and protested against the imposition of a blatantly prejudiced law and I remember well giving an interview to the BBC about the Rural Affairs Minister who was cancelling engagements because he was ‘not welcome in the countryside’. At the time Labour was flying high in the polls and hunting was just seen as ‘red meat’ for the left of the party. They cheered at Labour conference when John Prescott had his annual dig at “the contorted faces of the Countryside Alliance.” When the electoral cycle turned and things started happening suddenly, however, the nasty taste of Labour’s culture war with the countryside had a profound impact. The electoral map of the British countryside since 2010 shows exactly what rural communities have thought of Labour.

The Alliance and our supporters are engaging at constituency level and at Westminster with Labour candidates, MPs and shadow Ministers stressing the priorities of the countryside. The work that Keir Starmer is doing to woo the rural vote shows that he understands the electoral mathematics and the importance to Labour of being seen as more than just an urban party. The decision that he will have to make in 2024 is whether he wants the totemic issue of hunting to overshadow everything he is trying to do in the same way that it soured Labour’s relationship with the countryside the last time it was in power.