Unhappy Alliance
From Lord Mancroft Sir: Peter Oborne's thoughtful review (Politics, 6 April) of the battle for hunting was not entirely accurate in its every detail.
It is correct that the Alliance made a deliberate policy decision to engage with New Labour following the 1997 election; but we have never negotiated with the government about hunting. The Alliance will continue to support and promote all currently legal forms of hunting, and will not compromise on that principle, nor will it contemplate sacrificing one sport to save another.
In particular, it is crucial to show that the majority does not support a ban on hunting if we are to resist the elected dictatorship of the House of Commons, which has threatened to use the Parliament Act to impose its will on the Second Chamber that Blair created. That threat, more than any single factor, has resulted in peers from all sides of the House moving to support us, and set the wheels in motion that may well lead to the biggest constitutional crisis that we have faced in my political lifetime. Never before has the House of Commons, as an act of political revenge, sought to use the criminal law to stop a law-abiding minority from leading their lives as they choose, without harming or endangering anyone else.
However, until the last debates on hunting, and the government's announcement following them, it would have been a waste of energy to protest and demonstrate without specific targets. We believed that it was right to restrain our supporters until every moral, intellectual and political argument had been made and won, and until we had explored every possible way of getting the government off the hook on which the Prime Minister's weakness had impaled it.
That has now changed, and in answer to the Prime Minister's pathetic inability to stand up to his backbenchers, the Countryside Alliance has announced a 'summer of discontent', during which the government will learn what will happen if it tries to ban hunting against the advice of its own independent inquiry, contrary to every reasoned argument, without the support of a clear majority of the British people, and solely to appease the spite of MPs unequal to the responsibilities of their position.
Mancroft Board member, Countryside Alliance, London SEI1
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