Before anything, I will say that the Red Tractor Scheme was a good idea, even though with my consumer hat on, I’m not convinced it really meant all that much to shoppers.
On that note rests the question of who really gets the value from it, and from that perspective, its possible to begin joining up the dots regarding the latest row that has developed around future changes and the relationship between the Scheme and ‘green farming’.
Whilst everything looks very simple, the truth is that complexity rules the day and many of us don’t understand the relationships and motives that lie behind many of the problems that agriculture and businesses are facing.
At face value, most people simply wouldn’t believe what’s actually happening and what corporate interests are doing to entire industries as they seek to control every part of the food supply chain across the UK. Acting as if even the farms they buy produce from, are no more than facilities that they own.
Regrettably, big money interests want more profit than they already have and they have successfully hidden behind the lie thar is ‘free markets’ and yes, Globalisation, to trash genuine government and regulations and then replace it with a system of their own that they control.
My concern is that whilst overtly created with the best of intentions for Farming and Food Production, devices like the green agenda are just new ways of ratcheting down more and more control of the food production system. So that every penny of profit or ‘the fat’ that exists at any point within the entire food supply chain is controlled and funnelled into the hands of those who control it.
Consider this scenario:
Many farmers – perhaps every farmer, has at some point signed up to some kind of contract sale arrangement for their crops, animals or produce, perhaps with a dairy, a big retailer or an agent of some kind.
Within these relationships, it has been considered normal or necessary to share just about every bit of data about the farm, what equipment is used, the number of animals, number and type of staff – and much, much more.
Afterall, what does it matter when you are working for the same goals and these are people you can trust?
It’s likely that right now, an unworldly economics graduate, perhaps sat in a commuter town HQ, somewhere near London, is looking at every detail their employer has hoovered up through this process of ‘granting contracts’ or ‘beneficial arrangements’ of some kind. That’s the one mentioned above where they have insisted that they are the farmers friend and that all this information helps to raise standards, meet targets, and no doubt of late ‘helps to achieve Net Zero, or make the industry green’.
What they didn’t tell you is that from this data, this analyst or someone like them that the farmer will never meet, can work out exactly what everything is costing on that farm. They can then then use statistical averages and data of the kind that inform our politicians, to make decisions on what the farmer is ‘entitled’ to earn – knowing exactly what their spreadsheets have told them the farmer should ‘charge’ to cover the costs of their ‘wage’ and absolutely everything else.
***
Yes, the chances are that the companies and retailers that farmers ‘sell’ to are working out what they believe those farmers need so that they earn the average wage (if they are lucky), and without the farmer even being aware, nothing is any longer that farm business owners’ choice.
If farms are dependent on these companies and their contracts – no matter how well intended or how they were sold, the business that the farmer is contracted too basically owns the farm.
As such, farmers are right to be very concerned about where so-called standards are taking the industry, as the level of data and therefore control that these interests will have and will be able to exert, is only likely to grow, whilst politicians continue to fail to represent the interests not only of the food producing industries, but of the public at large.
Right now, the destination is already over the cliff. But it could get worse, with Supermarkets now trying to claw back whatever they can from what they clearly believe to be over generous relationships with the key suppliers within the UKs Food Supply Chain.
Young children are now suffering health problems that just decades ago were likely only to be experienced by a much older and very unlucky few. Obesity not only affects a significant part of the population, but it is also being championed as if it is normal, and we are vilified for daring to speak openly about such a point of view.
Like the rise in so many different health related conditions that are seriously compromising far too many people’s quality of life, the biggest proportion of all of them would be no more than an afterthought, if we were to bring back healthy eating and balanced diets in the form of basic and essential foods.
Sadly, the belief that cheap, sweet, salty, easy to buy, quick to eat ‘food’ is healthy for us is a well-crafted and massively convincing lie. We have had this nonsense repackaged by advertisers and the media in the same way that we are being told that if everyone were to consume healthy, basic and unprocessed foods, it would be more expensive than it is for us to eat it as the apparently luxury we have been conditioned to believe that it has now become.
We have been encouraged to eat the way that we eat and to feed our families the way that we do, not because it will benefit any of us. But because the foods, drinks and treats that we have become addicted to make somebody somewhere VERY rich.
What many of us don’t even realise that all of these ‘wonderful’ foods – and even the takeaways that have become a staple diet for some rather than just being an irregular treat – will have travelled many miles and been constructed artificially using ingredients that themselves may have been made in many different factories. They have traveled across continents before the end product you recognise has even been made.
It’s all part of the con called globalisation. A lie we are told we must celebrate and embrace as the legitimised truth. Because globalisation is all about international trade – which is how wars are stopped and how good relationships between different countries are made.
What the Establishment salesmen never talked about, and their pet media ignored, was the reality that jobs and communities have been lost, as well as the livelihoods that went with them.
Stupidly, we never really questioned the whole process because we were taught to become obsessed with speed of delivery, availability and what we still believe to be the lowest cost.
The reprogramming of our buying habits has contributed to or given the excuse necessary for almost all hope of this Country being Self-Sustainable in Essential Food Production being destroyed.
Meanwhile, the equally destructive EU policies that were supposed to be good for our economy within a so-called single market, also represented an advanced politicised form of the globalisation franchise. EU doctrine on food production has progressively made UK Farms all but impossible to run.
Globalisation was good whilst it lasted. Or rather, that’s what the majority of us are still expected to believe.
However, because of many different reasons that only include government responses to Covid, to Brexit, The War in Ukraine and the idiocy of Free Markets and Neoliberalism in the way that everything has been run, the supply chains that crisscross the world are now collapsing.
Forced change and possible shortages too, are only a matter of time.
As part of the so-called Great Reset or Agenda 2030, the solution to this coming problem that the elites created themselves isn’t to go back to basics and focus on localised supply chains. Indeed, whilst they actively ignore the crisis within UK Farming and in other countries where their counterparts are actively taking steps to see highly productive farms destroyed, they are instead telling us that we will all be happy eating ground up crickets and foods that have been made in a lab.
There is no good or humane reason for People to be treated this way, other than it being part of a strategy or plan to ensure that those who hold power over us now, remove our ability to support ourselves in the future.
As the crisis the Elites have created takes deeper and deeper hold, the agenda they are pursuing will ensure they will have and be able to maintain their grip on power, and we will all be dependent to a dystopian system where these few have absolute control. Unless we use the opportunity, their stupidity and greed has created, to take our own power back.
As part of The Grassroots Revolution and the rejection of everything held dear by the leaders of this dying ‘old world’, we MUST embrace a return to the most localised forms of food production and supply chains.
Food production must focus on healthy, basic and essential food items, using the absolute minimum of additional ingredients, so that our basic diets are home-produced, and this system of production is prioritised over everything else, so that the food we need, will always be available to us all in the cheapest and most accessible form.
Regrettably, because UK Agriculture has been deliberately pointed in the wrong direction for a very long time, younger generations of farmers have no working experience of anything like a truly localised food growing-to-production-to-retail system in anything like the way it historically was and will be needed now.
This means that the process of change will take time and that for reasons outside of our control, certain foods may become short.
It is therefore essential that everyone who is able use gardens, allotments, window boxes and whatever form of growing space available to ‘grow your own’. So that there will be sufficient basic and healthy essential foods available, whilst we all get behind our Farmers and develop the resources and cooperatives that will be necessary in every area.
We must do this to ensure that we have Food Security for the UK and achieve the National Self Sufficiency that we would have long since had, if politicians had been doing their job, and the greed and self-interest of the few, hadn’t been allowed to flourish and lead instead.
I have covered the subject of Basic Foods and Home Growing in detail within Levelling Level, the first book in the series leading to The Grassroots Manifesto. To read Levelling Level online or Download a FREE PDF copy, please Click HERE.
Levelling Level discusses the wider issues that we now face, how we got here and begins focusing on many of the things that we and our communities have the power to do.
In Part 3 of The Grassroots Manifesto, a series of Public Policies have been suggested for a new people-centric age. This is one of a number that relate specifically to this issue:
The Grassroots Manifesto | Policy 4 | Food Production, Security & Supply | Home Growing | xviii
Self-sufficiency of people is essential to achieving the aim of the UK becoming self-sufficient in food production and providing the Community with Food Security.
Farmers are by nature, the most creative and entrepreneurial managers, engineers and technical workers that I know. They are, or rather they become these multitalented vocational giants by living lives that involve operational management, frequently calling them into action at any time, 24hrs a day, 365 days a year – pretty much from the day that they are born.
Farmers are, in effect, the complete antithesis of our Members of Parliament and the political class. And it’s because of the lack of understanding and respect for what British Farmers do, that the politicians we have – whether in Government or not, have allowed British Agriculture and all of the industries allied to and feeding into it, to reach the state that they are now in.
The problems that British Farmers face remain closely aligned to what their European counterparts are experiencing.
Indeed, whilst many from what in 2016 was the Remain camp are still pushing the narrative that leaving the EU and the whole Brexit vote was a gargantuan mistake, those same people are strangely silent when it comes to comment or discussion on what Farmers within in the EU Member nations are facing right now.
Across Europe, unelected bureaucrats and out of touch politicians are pushing an agenda which will see Nation States close down some of the very best food production in the world. All at a time when supply chains are already collapsing, there are growing food shortages and in no time at all it will not just be hungry people who are out of sight and out of mind that could be the ones who are about to starve or go without.
What underscores the futility and the madness of this perverse strategy, pursued by people who have never been at the hard end of an operational business in their life, is the reality that their grand plan mirrors the ridiculous decisions made by the political classes across Europe not only to shelve and mothball, but to destroy fossil fuel burning energy plants and sources. All coming under the ridiculous assumption that buying in supplies and services from elsewhere from across the World is not only safe, but can be sold to the public as being green and therefore alright.
Yes, you did read that correctly. The leading classes of Europe and the UK too, are and have for some time quite literally been shutting down, wilfully neglecting and even deliberately destroying our own national systems of production.
The politicians we have elected to look after our best interests have been making us all vulnerable to whoever they then do some kind of deal to buy replacement supplies and services from.
All of this is so that Politicians can pay lip service to fulfilling an impossibly idealistic promise of achieving Net Zero – or some other departure from reality based narrative they are pushing that isn’t just economic with the truth, but is an outright lie.
Why is the lie so important? The lie that the politicians tell is so important, because it’s just another lie to cover up the impact of another very big and very damaging lie about the benefits of globalisation and commercialisation – which is what the EU was always really about.
The irony should be lost on none of us that Globalisation and greed-based Commercialism are the real and genuine cause of all of the climate and environmental problems that we do genuinely have.
Equally, we should be under no illusion that the climate and environmental problems that we do genuinely have would go into free fall, in the direction of positive change, the moment that we stepped back from the money is god and a profit led existence, and allowed on-shoring, relocalisation and the protectionism that is now essential to the UKs future to be restored.
Whilst it will never be said about the European Union, even by many of the Brexiteers who never really understood this part of the EU Membership travesty themselves, the EU and everything about it has just been one disastrous exercise in globalisation and commercialisation.
The Common Market and everything that followed as part of the EU Project evolution was a self-serving spin off of the Globalisation myth, repackaged with the lie that with the overarching politicisation and centralisation of the European sub version, the issues that befall the removal of international barriers and the many risks it brings on a Global level, would never be our own.
As many of us can already see with just the Energy Crisis alone, this foolishness – however well intended, doesn’t work when so many differences of opinion, cultures and different ways of being are involved.
We can all see what has happened as a result of Western Governments responding as they have to the war in Ukraine, when the same politicians had destroyed our own self sufficiencies in order to ‘open up the doors’.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the impact of all the very poor decision making that got into full swing long before Brexit, Covid and Ukraine were ever in the frame.
Sadly, the system collapse that so many within the elites, the establishment and our own government are doing so much to hide, is already well underway.
It’s just the case that we are not all going over the cliff at the same moment in time. That’s why not all of us can see it. YET.
However, the fall of an entire industry that will affect all of us – our Farming Industry – is most definitely already underway. And we fail to realise, accept and understand this at our peril.
Yes, food is on the supermarket shelves. We can still get just about everything we could possibly want. So you are probably asking the question, ‘Why should we be worried about Farmers and British Agriculture now?
Sadly, we will not believe that life can be any different to what it is now, until it already is.
If you need an example that makes sense of this, cast your mind back to the beginning of 2020 when the first lockdown began and then life changed for us all in an instant.
We may have forgotten Social Distancing and Lockdowns for now. But many of the direct consequences of disastrously poor decision making on the part of our politicians is only just beginning to materialise now, nearly three years on.
Amongst all of the issues which are currently popular, the ability of the UK to feed itself is strangely absent from that list. Yet the UK Food supply is now at massive risk of collapse – That’s the supply of the food that we need to meet our basic needs and not the ridiculous variety of imported and mass processed items and ingredients that we have become used to.
Our Basic food supply is at risk for a number of reasons. These include the centralisation and globalisation of food supply chains which are going to collapse; the way that British Agriculture has been placed at the mercy of innumerable agents, resellers, speculators, traders and middle men who take massive profits whilst adding no value and push farm prices down, whilst pushing retail prices up; and decades of reconditioning under the auspices of EU membership that has led British Farmers to rely on subsidies that have taken away the incentive and freedom to compete.
There are many more.
The situation regarding our food supply is much more complicated and serious than it is possible to do real justice here.
The real tragedy and threat to us all, is that because our Politicians created or led the implementation of the market structures that are currently at work – even though they did so in no small part on behalf of the EU – everyone, and most importantly our Farmers, are expecting our politicians to ensure that every issue created by Brexit, along with the collapse of global supply chains and the fallout of other events such as the War in Ukraine, will be dealt with – as it is perfectly reasonable and logical for us to be able to expect.
They have not. They are not. They will not be addressed by the politicians we have.
The real problem that even these very credible sources cannot counter, is that our politicians are so out of touch and prioritise whatever they believe to be in their best interests.
It is not until you really begin to understand just how out of touch with reality our politicians actually are, that you can then start to consider and appreciate that the British People are heading for an extraordinary amount of pain, that would have been both unnecessary and avoidable IF we had politicians that fulfilled their responsibilities as they always should do.
Getting people and especially Farmers to realise and understand that the solutions will not come from this government or any new government that is formed from the political parties or groups that are known to us and that we have on offer to us today is challenging indeed. Especially as it means that the solutions we now need, through restructuring, onshoring and relocalising supply chains to a what we would recognise as being conversant with a much more traditional form, MUST be led with British Farmers and all of the related industries right out in front. Just as the political change that we all so desperately need must also come from the grassroots up.
I began writing this blog by making reference to the ingenuity and industriousness of our Farmers. This has already been well illustrated by the many ways that members of the Farming Community have already diversified their businesses, to become manufacturers, growers, producers and retailers of a very different kind, taking back control and managing every step of the process from farm to fork themselves, or working collaboratively on a very small localised scale, where it can quite literally be said that many hands make light work.
Whilst our Politicians will not accept this probably until it is too late to avert further harm, UK self sufficiency in food production, as well as the majority of the key things or basics that we are going to need, is not only now strategically key to our future. This is how world events and the UKs circumstances will soon dictate that they MUST be.
We cannot wait for the politicians to change their minds, or it wont just be the cost of living crisis, but shortages of basic foods that make British People hungry too.
Our existing politicians will always exhibit loyalty to the very system that has broken the back of British Farming for no other reasons than greed, profit and control. The existing Public Policies on Farming, Fisheries and Food have certainly never been for the purposes of benefiting UK Industries or British consumers – no matter the lies and the lies to cover up those lies that we have been continually told.
Please can we all wake up before its too late and there is nothing left to work with. We need a revolution in farming and we need it to happen now.
It will not come from the top and must run from the grassroots up. Farmers must be at the middle of local food supply – the way it should always have been.
The people living and working in Villages and Towns around mid and Northern Gloucestershire and South Worcestershire experienced the worst that inland flooding can throw at us – and for a great many even more, when critical infrastructure was affected and the drinking water supply dried up as result.
Nobody could argue that the impact of the event did not come to the attention and supposed scrutiny of Westminster Politicians at the time. Pictures of RAF Rescue Helicopters winching stranded people to safety whilst hovering against the backdrop of the Cotswold Hills quickly caught international attention. I stood outside the Local Council Offices when then newly appointed Prime Minister Gordon Brown arrived.
At the time, within the immediacy of the flooding event itself, it felt like the powers that be simply couldn’t do enough.
But the moment that the floodwaters receded, the RAF had returned their big yellow flying machines to their bases and tap water supplies were restored, the media’s and therefore the attention of the politicians with the real power to do something meaningful simply drifted off to elsewhere and beyond.
Yes, remedial flood protection work took place here and there – especially in places that are very much in the wider public’s eye.
But the changes made in response to the Floods that year were in many ways little more than being aesthetic.
There was then and has been since no change in the way that Politicians, Government and the Agencies address the causes, influences upon and effects of flooding across the UK – despite many similar experiences for other people and communities across the Country that have already happened and are taking place in Yorkshire and the East Midlands today.
What was clear to me as a Local Councillor at the time of the 2007 Floods here, was that the Environment Agency wasn’t fit for purpose; that flooding was and always would be managed on the basis of so-called tried and tested thinking. And worst of all, that there was absolutely no room for new approaches or original thinking to deal with the problem as the specialists and those who possess the fiefdoms that are public sector responsibility would always know best – no matter what the reality and impact upon real people was or would be that was involved.
And whilst processes and procedures to deal the impact upon families that have to move out of their homes and perhaps live in caravans as a result for many months now appear to have become normalised, the fact that Government has concentrated only on managing the effects of any flooding crisis at the time, rather than dealing with the causes and what lies ahead should be telling us all that we really need to know.
Flooding isn’t a vote winner when there’s no water on the ground
With the shallow, self-serving politicians that we have in power today, the harsh reality we must all face is that in their majority, Politicians and the Political Parties that they represent are not interested in seeing any task through from start to finish, unless they believe that doing so will secure them more votes.
What our Emergency Services, our Military, and the people on the ground will do in Yorkshire and the East Midlands during the current crisis to help people will not be an issue in Westminster once the water has gone and this ridiculous General Election Campaign has passed by.
Addressing the issues that count and will make a difference – that’s Planning Policy, responding to the Housing Crisis, how we address Climate Change and the way that the Public Sector itself actually works, are not and never will be on the agenda for longer than it remains in the news. Or at least not until we have politicians with very different motives and people-first mindset involved.
Planning Policy
Many people don’t understand that Local Authorities don’t make planning law. They just interpret it.
And with rules that come from the centre – rules that sound great because they seem to consider this and sound great because they appear to consider that – we have all been misled into believing that a one-size-fits-all approach to the way that we build in all locations, environments and conditions across this Country can work out for everyone wherever they are in the same way – even with different people with different motives doing the interpretation that is involved.
For instance, the Planning System is itself so arbitrary that floodplains that have been built up and covered with dumped earth and inert debris then qualify as being safe to build on. Yet there is no consideration for the displacement of floodwaters that would have historically rested at that location. Nor is there though given for how that water might flow around this newly created island or indeed what other properties or places would now be affected by what will be both a new and at time of flooding inevitably different water flow.
For the impact of future flooding events to be limited for existing properties, Towns, Cities and Villages to the same levels and impact that they are having right now, Planning rules and the way that we interpret them must change to embrace the increasing likelihood of the black swans, rather than the imbedded mentality of ‘it couldn’t happen here’.
Unswerving technical adherence to manmade rules doesn’t allow for reach and impact of Mother Nature.
Solving problems without creating others must be a priority for all areas of civic life and activity.
The response to the Housing Crisis
Yet another of the political footballs that is currently being bounced around is the topic of which Political Party will build more houses and how quickly they will build them if they should find themselves in power once the Election question has been resolved.
The myth that we need to build so many new houses evaporates the very moment that you consider how much they actually cost.
How often have you seen house prices drop in any part of this Country when a new estate or development has been built?
The truth is that prices of old and new property in the local areas usually rise and like most things where prices and need can be manipulated, profit and therefore greed are the underlying cause.
Building at the levels we have already embraced is already creating a time bomb for potential flooding incidents that would never have had this kind of impact in the past – especially with planning policy as it is.
There needs to be a massive rethink and politicians who were thinking about the people they represent would certainly bring this foolish and ill considered approach to the problem to an immediate stop.
The way to deal with the housing crisis is to make better and more equitable use of the houses and buildings that we already have.
It isn’t helpful to pretend that the only solution is to keep on building more and more, whilst creating many more real ones than the hollow one that it is supposed to solve.
Climate Change
Yes, Climate Change or the Climate Crisis that our young people are now beginning to champion and the way of thinking that they are challenging is a very real part of the flooding problem too.
The weather in this Country and around the World is changing – no matter what your views might be about the cause.
The cold hard reality that we all have to face is that the weather patterns that are here today will take many years to reverse.
But there are steps that we can take to address their progression and pathway to becoming worse.
It is not simply about legislating to change the behavior of people who are already trying to make the best of what can be very difficult lives.
This is where the inexperience and impractical idealism of young people could easily be seen to make a valid argument that is beneficial to us all seem outwardly very wrong. Like Flooding events, protests soon disappear from the minds and plans of the wrong politicians and that is the truth – no matter how wrong.
Sadly, with Climate Change, much of the problem is again about money and greed.
The businesses that have the biggest part to play just need to be led to think differently and see that the profit which is their obsession is still there for them tomorrow as it is for them today. It will just come from them investing, operating and behaving ethically in a very different way.
Industry and money might not be listening now, but that will be different when we have different people in charge.
The necessity of political change that wont be served simply by having a General Election
The complexity of the problems that are contributing to the Housing Crisis, the failure of Planning Policy, Climate Change and Flooding as an issue in its own right will never be dealt with in the way that it needs to be by politicians who are only interested in the outcome of the next Election and how they convince all of us to give them their vote.
If we want the change that we need with the issues that we are facing not just like Flooding, but which we are experiencing each and every day, we must elect different people into Parliament, our Councils and into positions of power who will put people first. Politicians who know what it will take and – most importantly – are actually prepared to do everything necessary to get all of those things that need doing – and not just Brexit – done.
Like Brexit, Hunting has become an emotive subject which is safest left far away from discussion with people we know little about.
Few of us consciously acknowledge why this really is, and the elements of a solution which has the potential to be one supported by all have become hidden by the polarisation of ideas. The inevitable isolation of facts which follows is seen as an unacceptable compromise for each party as they become ever reluctant to recognise validity in any idea which extends beyond the scope and value set of their own.
The biggest elephant in the room for Hunting, is that no matter what supporters or those against this pastime tell us, the debate has long since been anything to do with either the activities or survival of a fox. Yet the actions of both groups in the debate present a story which is very different. If a resolution that works for all is genuinely to be found, each side and the politicians in between them will have to accept that both sides will have to be far more practical in the way they manage the pathways of their respective idealistic ground.
With the various truths presented as fact by some and interpreted as myth by others, the objective reality of this ‘sport’ is that it has very little to do with being competitive and everything to do with a highly social and lifestyle movement, which to its own detriment has become obsessive about a perceived right to hunt our indigenous wild-dog.
The world has moved on. Very few of us believe that the most efficient way to control any kind of mammalian pest, is to become hierarchically attired, mount a very expensive and well-kept horse and then charge around what is left of the open countryside with forty or more others doing exactly the same. Trundling alongside a pack of perhaps a hundred English Foxhounds who are never as happy as when they are simply out for a very long run.
In the years since the implementation of the ‘hunting ban’ under the tenure of the last Labour Government, Hunts around the Country have been doing surprisingly well without any genuine need to reverse the purpose of the Legislation. Hunt protesters and saboteurs would beg to differ, as foxes can often be disturbed and find themselves at the mercy of a brutal, but nonetheless non-intentional act, and it is at this point that we should perhaps all be minded of the propensity of accidents and the fact that many, many more foxes are likely to be killed on the roads during hunting season, than those uncovered accidentally by any hunt which should happen to gallop past.
Open discussion regarding the experience of death for any human or animal concludes quickly for any rational person, as soon as the presence of any deliberate cause or intent is removed. Like it or not, we cannot control that which cannot be controlled, and seeking to prevent any form of accident would easily bring into question just about everything that we do.
Those against hunting – even in its current form should remember this well and be ever mindful of the progressive leap which has already been achieved. There now needs to be an acceptance that this fieldsport is nothing like what it once was and that any form of resentment based upon perception alone, whilst dressed up as a legitimate debate will help no one.
Hunts and the hunt lobby itself would likewise do well to recognise and accept that killing foxes at any costs by applying the law in its most literal sense is a self-defeating act. Using devices such as large birds of prey to kill foxes they have uncovered, gives the true lie to an unnecessary intention and mindset which itself continues to fuel the antagonistic fervour and physical-activist approach of those against whom they have in some cases become violently opposed.
Hunting in its current form and in the way it really should now evolve, is not just the preserve of the wealthy and the one percent which many now love to hate. It is a lifestyle enjoyed by people from all backgrounds and we are as likely to see a plumber, builder or chef taking part as a rider, as we would a landowner or a London banker out for a day from their country home.
It is time that we recognised that Hunting is not about foxes and can be enjoyed by anyone. The Hunts need to stop attempting to play the rules and accept the spirit of the hunting ban in the manner in which it was implemented. The anti-hunt lobby should accept and recognise that they themselves have no legitimate right to police the activities of any hunt, and that holding a set of different ideas to someone else doesn’t mean that we have no choice but to physically collide.
The Hunting Act desperately needs intelligent and considered reform. There is nothing to be gained from it simply being overturned. The direct and related steps that a government seeking to deliver a revised act that would appropriately consider the rights, welfare and respect for the genuine rule of law for all – including the fox itself, could however include:-
Making it illegal to:
Intentionally and/or proactively pursue a fox as, for or as part of a social gathering, either directly with dogs or indirectly with alternative measures such as firearms or birds of prey.
Intentionally and/or proactively interfere with the activities of any hunt, its members, supporters or guests so convened as a social gathering
Recognising that:
Genuine intent is everything. That accidents do occur and no hunt, officer, member, guest or supporter thereof should ever be held liable for the result of any fox or other mammal being uncovered by a group of hounds during the course of a social hunt
Either restructuring the Governance structure of the Charity’s ‘Council’ to ensure that appointments are democratic and reflective of the impartial and non-political nature of the responsibilities with which the RSPCA has been entrusted
Or removing the responsibility and prosecutorial role of the RSPCA altogether, perhaps passing them to local authorities where democratic transparency and professional impartiality would be easier to monitor and define
With the current political environment having made hunting feel almost impossible to discuss, it is little wonder that our embattled Prime Minister is looking to secure votes by being perceived to be considering switching sides. The irony of such a choice is that divisive as Foxhunting may be, the very best solution will be making the effort and winning the arguments which will deliver a less than perfect, but nonetheless beneficial win for all.
Odd as it may seem to many of today’s political class, solutions which work for all of us are always possible, whenever there is a genuine willingness to talk.
Adam Tugwell 