Over at the Spectator Coffee House blog James Forsyth has trailed a provokative Tory ruse to repeal the hunting ban:
It would look a bit odd if the Tories were to immediately devote substantial parliamentary time to it given all the other problems the country is facing.
However, there is an idea doing the rounds in Conservative circles as to how the party could get around this problem. Rather than a bill devoted exclusively to repealing the hunting ban, there would be one that would concentrate on a whole host of civil liberties issues including ID cards. Hunting would merely be a section of it, with a free vote on the issue. This way the party would avoid the appearance of spending a considerable amount of time on the relatively fringe issue of hunting and would get to frame repeal of the ban as a civil liberties issue.
I have to confess that my first reaction upon reading this wasn't concern for the welfare of foxes - it was relief that the Tories appear to still be thinking about a freedom bill. Dominic Grieve toyed with the idea at the Convention on Modern Liberty early this year, but having heard nothing about it since I put this down to a case of the Shadow Justice Minister trying to win over a libertarian audience, all of whom had received copies of Chris Huhne's excellent Freedom Bill in their delegate packs. A freedom bill on these lines, which included the surveillance systems, the databases and the whole paraphernalia of authoritarian measures introduced in the name of technological modernisation and the fight against crime and terrorism, would undoubtedly be a good thing.
On the other hand, I'm less sure how to react to the potential inclusion of hunting in such a bill. One thing is for sure: it's bound to be controversial. When we were organising CML, the presence of the Countryside Alliance in the mix of partner organisations, provoked a volly of furious emails and blog comments from people claiming that the CA's support for hunting precluded them from a campaign for civil liberties. After concerned messages from two of our speakers, who had been pressured by one especially determined animal rights activist not to attend the Convention, we had to issue a statement on the website outlining our reasons for their inclusion.
Those on the other side of the hunting debate were equally passionate, arguing that hunting is a liberty issue and that the CA belonged at the Convention just as much as anyone else. In a thoughtful post John Jackson, who part-founded the CA, described how it exists to defend the rights of the rural minority against a fequently ignorant and disdainful urban majority - the CA's slogan is, after all, "liberty and livelihood".
But is the hunting ban a civil liberties issue? It certainly involves a restriction on liberty in the same sense that other laws proscribing particular activities restrict liberty, but I doubt even the most red-faced pro-hunt Tory would claim that the right to hunt possesses the same qualities of moral importance and urgency which characterise "civil liberties".
So is it a good idea to mix the two like this? For what it's worth my own position on hunting is that I'm against it, but I'm also against banning it. My main concern, recalling the massive amount of time and energy wasted debating fox hunting during Labour's first term, is that this becomes a distration from the far more serious business of repealing the torrent of authoritarian laws passed in the last ten years. Laws that affect real civil liberties.
