Following on from the budget last Wednesday where one on Labour’s flagship policies Work Tax Credits was hammered and George Osbourne stole the socially just Living Wage policy as a pure political spin for the right wing press in one of the most political driven budgets ever undertaken.
This Wednesday could see another Labour milestone being dismantled, the Hunting with Hounds Act of 2004.
This is a story that the hunters want to forget, goes back to 2004 when the hunting act was being debated. Simon Hart was the CEO of the Countryside Alliance and is currently the Tory MP for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire.
Pest Control has always been a lie and as we have seen with Stag Hunting on Exmoor and Dartmoor, Scientific Research and Observation is simply the lie used the world over to hunt whales, dolphins, stags and now foxes if the Prime Minster gets his way. He and his family are part and parcel of the hunting set meeting the bloody cruel needs of the Countryside Alliance.
But to return to 2004 a good reporter Grant Hodgson on the Sunday Mirror reported on the “Pest Control” arguments as follows:
BLOODY LIARS Sunday Mirror, Oct 3, 2004 | by GRANT HODGSON . Read article here.
THE pro-hunting lobby’s main argument for killing foxes – to control them as pests – is today revealed as a lie.
The Sunday Mirror has learned that a letter sent by the Masters of Fox Hounds Association to 800 hunt masters and chairmen warns of a nationwide “shortage of foxes”.
It also urged that landowners should be encouraged to breed more foxes to solve the “problem”.
The letter came to light when the Sunday Mirror obtained a copy of an email sent in response to it by Simon Hart, chief executive of the pro-hunt Countryside Alliance.
In the email to Lord Daresbury, chairman of the MFHA, he expressed his concern that if the letter was leaked “we would be ridiculed in Parliament, the Press and in all parts of Britain where hunting is firstly population control and secondly recreational.”
He added: “I do want to re-stress that the Alliance is here to play its part in securing hunting’s future but we cannot do this if the core arguments are undermined. I am one of those who has never been happy about our reliance on the ‘pest control’ case, partly because so few people understand that control is not always the same as extermination – in fact it rarely is.”
He calls the letter – which he says “advocates the artificial enhancement of a pest species for purely sporting benefit” – “politically naive”. He says the letter’s suggestion that hunt masters “should be firmer with subscribers ‘who do not keep foxes’ dismays me”.
Incredibly, he then asks: “How do we explain that to the Mirror?”
This Tory government has its sights set on the poor and the local wildlife; the poor to generate tax cuts and the wildlife for entertainment.
Is this really what people voted for?
Graham Forsyth
Chard
Somerset