How far can they go?
Molly Watson on the future plans of the pro-hunting hearties who invaded the Labour conference Nvhen the Ledbury huntsman John Holliday was arrested with Otis Ferry and six other pro-hunting protesters for breaking into the House of Commons during the debating of the Hunting Bill last month, the police rushed off to search his cottage at the hunt kennels for clues. Along with his computer, the innards of his telephone and much of the detritus of hound vaccination forms and old receipts that were cluttering his desk, they seized his copy of Bally's Hunting Directory.
Baily's is an exhaustive Who's Who of hunting. It lists details of every hunt across Europe, the Commonwealth, America, Africa and India, and also carries obituaries of notable followers of the chase interspersed with ads for carcass incinerators. Should one ever desire to locate a hireling for a bye day in the Punjab or find out the results of a hunt puppy show in the Black Forest, Bail's will have the answer.
Though some may think they should have forked out for their own copy, the Met were right to imagine that Bally's will come in handy over the coming months. This week they should have turned, once again, to the entry on the Ledbury hunt, It was another group from the Ledbury, led this time by Tom Leeke, a fireman and former whipperin to the pack, who managed to infiltrate the conference hall in Brighton and heckle Tony Blair during his keynote speech. Not bad going considering the men in tights had been replaced with a cordon of armed police guards and soldiers.
I joined the Ledbury, a small but bigjumping pack operating between the Malvern Hills and the River Severn, in 2002 in order to write In The Pink, a newcomer's account of fox-hunting. Back then the hunt seemed a hotbed of extramarital adventures rather than militant protest, but the mood at the Ledbury and many other hunts has changed a great deal over the last year. As Tom Leeke put it as he headed to Brighton, People are fed up with spending hours on buses in order to go somewhere and ask to politely discuss why hunting shouldn't be banned. I'm done with being a good egg; now I feel like throwing eggs.'
But what's the next move for the campaign to save hunting? There has been a lot of big talk from hunt supporters of late. Lucy Ferry, yummy mummy of Otis and exwife of rockstar Bryan, became the Berkeley Dress Show's answer to Arthur Scargill when she recently vowed to 'bring this government down'. I've also heard mutterings about blocking motorways with horse trailers, and in the Lake District an electricity pylon has reportedly been discovered with one of its legs sawn through and an accompanying note, signed by one John Peel, threatening much more of the same if the government invokes the Parliament Act to force a hunting ban through the Lords.
Of course, if anything brings Blair down it will be Iraq rather than hunting, and the cool heads at the Countryside Alliance acknowledge that traffic jams and power cuts will only serve to alienate public opinion. Yet there are strong signs that mainstream hunt supporters are growing increasingly frustrated with the Alliance's genteel approach to protesting. While Leeke and his friends were securing the pro-hunting campaign a mention on the evening news, the few thousand Alliance protesters were chanting peaceably but ineffectually on the seafront.
Following the storming of Parliament, the Countryside Alliance publicly distanced itself from law-breaking protests and privately called for all future pranks and demonstrations to be cleared with it first. Several masters of foxhounds responded by emailing back to explain in blunt terms that a single and pretty harmless act of lawlessness in the Commons Chamber had secured the campaign more news coverage and attention in a few minutes than the Alliance achieved in five years. It is also significant that groups like the Countryside Action Network and the Real Countryside Alliance, formerly considered the Alliance's lunatic fringe, saw their membership rocket by over 40 per cent in that week alone. This week's heroics will have given them a further boost. Peter Gent, leader of the Countryside Action Network, feels that it is vital for the pro-hunting lobby to keep its momentum and, while he claims to abhor violence, he's willing to up the ante much further than the Alliance, 'Firstly we've got to harass Alun Michael and anti-hunting MPs in a more confrontational manner,' he says. 'Last week Michael Foster [the Labour MP] never appeared at a constituency do in Kidderminster because we were there with enough eggs and mayhem to make his car look like an advert for a free-range farm.' Gent is also working on plans to dump carcasses of fallen stock that new regulations prevent hunt kennels from disposing of, quite literally, on Defra's doorstep. Then there's a document being well received by what he calls the powers that be that control hunting in the UK'. It outlines various ways in which the sport could reorganise itself to become unpoliceable: for example, by obscuring matters like the ownership of hounds and kennels in legal red tape.
But his trump card is an operation of 'major nationwide confrontation' that he plans to call Defiance Day. 'Tens of thousands of people go hunting in Britain each week. If we kept the element of surprise and they all turned out in towns or on roads on their horses in a cavalry of protest, there's no way the police could possibly control them. It would really show Mr Blair what he's going to be facing and it would only inconvenience the public for one day at a time.'
But the success of Defiance Day and every other significant hunt protest depends on how many people are prepared to keep fighting. 'How far ordinary people will take this issue is the most crucial factor in the campaign to save hunting, and it's the one question I can't answer,' Peter Gent concedes. Most country people also recognise that nothing will stop Labour forcing through a ban now, regardless of the scope and support of pro-hunting protests.
So the real test of fox-hunting's resolve will come after abolition. There are still two years to run until any ban comes into force and there is a danger that many hunt supporters, fearing the worst, will slowly drift away from the sport. But the Hunting Declaration, a document promoted by the galloping professor Roger Scruton, now has well over 56,000 signatories declaring themselves willing to break any law passed to ban hunting. Many thousands more are resolved on civil disobedience in the face of a ban and are already beginning to consider getting arrested to be no big deal.
Bally's Hunting Directory describes a web of comradeship that stretches the length and breadth of Britain, peopled by countrymen who know every last thicket and forgotten track of local farms and woodland far better than the police ever will. My guess is that it will still be being published five years from now — albeit in secret.
Molly Watson is a staff writer for Night & Day magazine.
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