Tim Bonner: Will Labour target hunting, grouse shooting and private land?

“Politicians receive calls from pressure groups to take action. Some of these calls are right. But governments cannot behave like single issue groups. And if it is wrong for the Right to stoke culture wars against minorities, it is just as wrong for the Left to stoke culture wars against rural minorities”. Not my words, but those of Peter Mandelson creator of the most successful left wing electoral force in British history, New Labour. Lord Mandelson was speaking at the inaugural Future Countryside event at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire where The Countryside Alliance Foundation brought together an extraordinary and diverse gathering of rural interests.

The event was in the words of more than one delegate “seminal” and covered a huge amount of ground across the rural agenda. This part of Lord Mandelson’s speech, however, was clearly aimed at those in his own party who obsess about divisive rural issues for overtly political reasons. The Telegraph took the view that he was primarily referring to hunting but my impression was that it was a broader warning. The last Labour manifesto did contain a commitment to legislate to “strengthen the Hunting Act” (which the party has subsequently recommitted to), but it also said that it would consult on banning grouse shooting and restrict game farming. In addition, only last month Labour shadow Defra Minister Alex Sobel announced that “Labour’s approach, like in Scotland, will be that Labour’s right to roam will offer access to high-quality green and blue space in the rest of Britain. We will replace the default of exclusion with a default of access”. 

Hunting has always been an obsession for Labour’s left and a cipher for the class war that they are not allowed to wage. Returning to waste yet even more parliamentary time on hunting would be a vindictive, divisive and ultimately pointless exercise, and widening the attack on the countryside to include grouse shooting and a blatant attack on the very principle of private land ownership might please those in Labour with distinctly Marxist tendencies, but to the rest of the country it will look exactly like the culture war against the rural minority that Lord Mandelson has warned against.

In his speech he also quoted what Keir Starmer said to the NFU annual conference a year after he became leader: “I want there to be a new relationship between the Labour Party and British farming and between Labour and rural communities”. I do not think there are many in the countryside who would disagree with that sentiment, but it will not happen if Labour’s electoral offer to the countryside is overshadowed by the politics of extremism and envy.