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THE GUARDIAN |
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Hunt ban is
class war, admits MP
Michael
White, political editor Peter Bradley MP, the former Westminster city councillor who now represents the industrial-rural mix of the Wrekin in north Shropshire, made his admission in the pro-hunting pages of the Sunday Telegraph, which were full yesterday of angry predictions of defiance and revolt. "It was class war. But it was not class war as we know it. It was not launched by the tribunes against the toffs - it was the other way round. This was not about the politics of envy, but the politics of power. Ultimately it's about who governs Britain," the MP wrote. To make himself clear, Mr Bradley, who is an unpaid parliamentary private secretary to Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, maintained that the countryside demonstrations had been about the fast-eroding power of the landed classes, not about the real countryside. "That's why they oppose the right to roam and a ban on hunting. For them it's ownership of property, especially land, and not citizenship, that confers privilege," he wrote. Several colleagues have said as much, though most have stressed the cruelty they see in hunting foxes. Such talk will further enrage the hunting fraternity, who claim theirs is a classless pastime, though that did not stop peers voting last week to terminate the livelihoods of hunt workers on February 18 rather than delay the ban until after the coming general election. The shadow defence spokesman, Nicholas Soames, expressed both anger and caution on GMTV yesterday. He directly accused Tony Blair of a lie - "his mendaciousness reached new heights" in claiming to have sought a last-minute compromise, hunting by licence, when he had previously voted for the ban. But Mr Soames urged hunters to be "extremely cautious." Some hunters who hoped the Lords would win through are now placing faith in the high court, where a request for judicial review of last week's use of the 1949 Parliament Act was lodged on Friday.
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