Starmer is about to repeat Blair's very worst mistake
The last time Labour was in government, Tony Blair wasted 700 hours of parliamentary time and fought a bitter battle in the countryside for seven years before traditional hunting was eventually banned. In his memoirs he wrote that the ban was 'one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret', and Labour paid the price by being largely unelectable in rural constituencies for a political generation.
Strangely the new Labour government seems determined to repeat the mistakes of the not-too-distant past. It was elected with a manifesto commitment to ban trail hunting – the successor to traditional hunting – which involves chasing the scent of a fox, rather than a fox itself.
Class war has always been the underlying motivation
You would have thought that this was a benign activity and, indeed, it is exactly what hunts were told to do when the original ban came in, but there are a section of Labour MPs, often being pressed by animal rights activists embedded in their local Labour parties, for whom hunting has always been a cipher for class ward.
They think the hunting ban has failed because hunts still exist. The eradication of the hunting community has always been their primary, if unspoken, aim. They will never be satisfied until the last hunt has closed and will attempt to ensure that any new legislation achieves that goal.
Meanwhile, ministers know perfectly well that this is an issue which is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of voters, as polling has consistently shown. It would be very difficult to square the Government's narrative about a relentless focus on tackling the fiscal challenge, driving growth and heading off international crises with a diversion into such petty and prejudiced legislation.
How the Government extracts itself from this mess is a challenging question. We are barely a year into a five-year parliament but every week another urban Labour MP asks Ministers when they will bring forward legislation to ban trail hunting.
Tony Blair's government was elected with a manifesto commitment to ban hunting and faced a similarly obsessive campaign from the backbenches. But it took five years and a second election victory before he was finally worn down and committed to legislation. Faced with backbenchers seething over the invasion of Iraq and a bitter parliamentary battle over the introduction of foundation hospitals the advice was to feed them the 'red meat' of hunting.
As an observer who has lived through one unpleasant bout of hunting legislation and seen the impact on Labour's reputation in the countryside, I would counsel the current Prime Minister against any such thinking this time around.
Hugely damaging issue for the Government
The Countryside Alliance has been warning the Labour Party for years about the political danger of legislating on hunting, not just because of the issue of trail hunting itself, but because of the message it sends to rural voters that the Government is not interested in their priorities.
More than that I do not believe that the country as a whole is impressed by partial, prejudice politics or believes that this issue should be a priority for a Government with so many other serious issues on its agenda. As Peter Mandelson memorably put it to a rural audience a couple of years ago: 'If it is wrong…for the Right-wing to stoke culture wars against minorities, it is just as wrong for the Left-wing in our country to stoke culture wars against rural minorities'.
Trail hunting may be a niche activity carried out by a rural minority, but it is also potentially a hugely damaging issue for the Government. No one has ever won a political battle over hunting, as Tony Blair himself has admitted, so manifesto commitment or not the sensible course is to stick to real priorities and leave well alone.
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