Having already rushed into an unpopular war based on extremely shaky evidence, the government is likely to completely ban smoking in all enclosed public places within four years. It’s for your own good, so stop complaining and let them get on with it, right?
Well…
With those examples of Blair’s blinkered arrogance in mind, isn’t it funny how he’s so keen to take criticism on board regarding the proposed hunting ban? A leader sending our brave Tommies out to do battle in the trenches and telling the (not only, but significantly) lower classes how not to spend their leisure time, while gleefully pandering to the privileged few? It’s the guilt-free new style of government for the 21st century… NOSTALGIOCRACY!
Seriously, cards on the table… I’m totally against hunting animals for sport. There is no “antlers bad, bushy tail good” grey area. There is no question of effective and humane pest control. And this opinion sits perfectly with my omnivorous diet. Killing animals as part of a food industry has nothing to do with killing animals for the fun of the chase. Nor is it a town vs. country issue. Ms Spaghetti is from a village in Wiltshire, and most members of her family (who are certainly not chattering class urban escapees) are anti-hunting. They are not statistical aberrations.
No, this latest spineless retreat by Tony Blair illustrates that hunting is still a class issue, just as it always has been. I’ll be interested to see what happens when Otis Ferry and his cronies appear in court soon, charged with their disorderly invasion of the House of Commons. Will it be a surprisingly lenient sentence? If an anti-war protester pulled *exactly* the same stunt, would the sentence be the same? What’s particularly galling is that so many of us originally voted for the Labour party back in the 80s and 90s (specifically 1997) on the understanding that a hunting ban would be one of their flagship policies.
Specifically, though, it looks like this latest development is an attempt by the Cabinet to pacify the pro-hunting lobby at least until after the (rumoured) Spring election. If so, I think it’s going to backfire horribly… judging by a couple of voxpop interviews on the BBC news, the hunting people know exactly what he’s up to, in which case we could be seeing the UKIP (or possibly Tories) and LibDems fighting over a sizeable number of newly floating voters.