Twenty-five years ago, before the Hunting Act was passed, a Labour Minister, the subsequently disgraced Ivor Caplin, refused to sign licences for hunts to operate on Ministry of Defence land. The response from the farming community was immediate and determined. 

Within a few days, permission for the use of hundreds of thousands of acres of private land for army training had been withdrawn and a major NATO training exercise in mid-Wales was on the point of being cancelled. Tony Blair’s government was nothing if not pragmatic, so it was no surprise that Caplin was rapidly hauled over the coals and the hunt licences signed, at which point the landowners renewed their agreements for army training.

Despite this example, farmers and landowners have otherwise been strangely compliant to government, agencies and utility companies as far as access is concerned. Probably because we tend to think that the motivation of such bodies is benevolent there does not tend to be an innate objection to allowing officials and operatives to access private land. There are, however, laws that govern who can access land for what purpose, and the steps that they must take before doing so.

This general assumption of well-intentioned access has, however, broken down in mid-Wales, where a group of more than 300 farmers has been granted permission to bring a Judicial Review against energy company Green GEN Cymru on the basis of unlawful conduct, unreasonable use of power, procedural impropriety and breach of human rights. There is a lot of spin around both sides of this argument, but essentially Green GEN Cymru, for all its hot air about “designing green energy pathways across Wales”, plans to build pylons across hundreds of miles of the Welsh countryside, including a particularly controversial 60-mile stretch of 33-metre-high pylons through the Tywi and Teifi Valleys. 

Equally, whilst the local campaign group bringing the Judicial Review is keen to state that “this is not a protest against renewable energy”, fundamentally they have an understandable objection to their valleys being despoiled by pylons and argue that new infrastructure should be buried underground. In a battle involving a major corporation with huge contracts pitted against a few hundred locals the outcome is usually predictable, but as Minister Caplin learned all those years ago, Welsh farmers standing up for their rights can be quite a problem. Whatever the outcome of the Green GEN Cymru Judicial Review, the cost-benefit analysis of burying cables rather than building pylons is changing. That is the point of the campaign, and it is working.

This sort of farmer and landowner activism is something ministers should not ignore, either in Cardiff or Westminster.  It would be foolish to assume that farmers and landowners will continue to cooperate even if the government enables draconian legislation on issues like trail hunting. As was showed all those years ago, hunting can generate coordinated action across the countryside and if Ministers choose to launch a culture war there will be a very real cost.