Friday 26 August 2011

Repeal of Hunting Act must wait until social gains made in the 40s are killed off


Your average fundraising event tends to consist of supporters either being asked to sponsor someone or buying a couple of quid’s worth of tickets with a token prize. Not so the Countryside Alliance, who not happy with some of their members owning a good stack of the land are charging £25 a ticket for their raffle. The prize? A chance for nine daft sods to obliterate 400 birds on a day’s sport that’s valued at £19,500.

The Alliance is still intent on seeing the Hunting Act 2004, that came into force on February 17th 2005, repealed and earlier this year Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed that he still intends to bring legislation to that effect before Parliament during his term of office, set to end in 2015. This is in line with agreement that the Tories made with the Liberal Democrats when they entered government together. This stated: “We will bring forward a motion on a free vote enabling the House of Commons to express its view on the repeal of the Hunting Act."

Cameron however faces a problem in that a number of new Tory MPs are - perhaps surprisingly as they’re so right wing on most other things - opposed to fox-hunting and have even set up a well resourced and organised group that means there’s by no means the certainty that the House of Commons as a whole would vote for repeal.

As Cameron is also engaged, largely successfully at the moment it has to said, on bashing the working classes through policies designed, whatever the consequences to the economy, to decimate the social gains made at the end of the World War II, when workers returned determined to create a ‘land fit for heroes’, then the repeal of the Hunting Act must wait.  

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