Steven Mace
02-23-2002, 06:09 AM
Opinion: Tony Blair is our salvation
By Charlie Jacoby
22/02/2002
There was a cheap argument doing the rounds until Wednesday last week. “Labour has been blooded,” it went. “It can’t ban fieldsports after slaughtering all that livestock.” That was the wrong argument in the case of Scottish Labour, which practises the politics of revenge in both this anti-hunting Bill and the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, due to go through by the summer.
English and Welsh Labour are different. South of the border, the Labour Party could indeed choose to ban fieldsports, but for the opposite reason. Where Scottish Labour MSPs lash out like drunks at whatever lurches into their view, the fate of Phoenix the calf showed that the English and Welsh Labour Party’s policy is only dictated by what looks good and gets them more votes with swing voters. Today, it seems that Blair is floating the idea that he is pro-fieldsports and that it is only his backbenchers who are anti. Senior Labour backbenchers had to fight a rearguard action to prevent Tony Blair and the then home secretary, Jack Straw, from dropping a commitment to ban fox hunting in the Labour manifesto.
Then there is the vexed question of the hatred of the Countryside Alliance by Labour’s rank and file. Well, it would be a vexed question if rank and file actually mattered. Blair is not interested in these people. They are going to vote Labour anyway. But he is interested in the 20% of voters who change their mind each election – and that slice could include the traditional country conservative.
“Labour can’t be trusted” might look good on TV but you should be scared of the Tories. It was the Conservative Government which banned handguns. Labour may have paraded Ann Pearston of the anti-gun Snowdrop Campaign on its conference platform (Labour even wrongly introduced her as a “Dunblane mother”) but it was the then Tory Scottish secretary Michael Forsyth, the then Tory home secretary Michael Howard and former Tory cabinet minister David Mellor who pushed the Bill through.
After Dunblane, it was Sebastian Coe – later one of William Hague’s closest advisers – who dropped his presidency of the National Pistol Association (NPA) like it was a hot brick. Watch out for those “forces of conservatism”. A pinko organisation such as the RSPCA may wring its hands about hunting and pay millions for advertisements to have it banned, but sanctimonious is as bad as Labour gets. It takes a solidly Tory group such as the National Trust ruling council under the chairmanship of Charles Nunneley actually to ban staghunting.
http://www.leadshot.com/story.asp?id=461
Steve Mace
By Charlie Jacoby
22/02/2002
There was a cheap argument doing the rounds until Wednesday last week. “Labour has been blooded,” it went. “It can’t ban fieldsports after slaughtering all that livestock.” That was the wrong argument in the case of Scottish Labour, which practises the politics of revenge in both this anti-hunting Bill and the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, due to go through by the summer.
English and Welsh Labour are different. South of the border, the Labour Party could indeed choose to ban fieldsports, but for the opposite reason. Where Scottish Labour MSPs lash out like drunks at whatever lurches into their view, the fate of Phoenix the calf showed that the English and Welsh Labour Party’s policy is only dictated by what looks good and gets them more votes with swing voters. Today, it seems that Blair is floating the idea that he is pro-fieldsports and that it is only his backbenchers who are anti. Senior Labour backbenchers had to fight a rearguard action to prevent Tony Blair and the then home secretary, Jack Straw, from dropping a commitment to ban fox hunting in the Labour manifesto.
Then there is the vexed question of the hatred of the Countryside Alliance by Labour’s rank and file. Well, it would be a vexed question if rank and file actually mattered. Blair is not interested in these people. They are going to vote Labour anyway. But he is interested in the 20% of voters who change their mind each election – and that slice could include the traditional country conservative.
“Labour can’t be trusted” might look good on TV but you should be scared of the Tories. It was the Conservative Government which banned handguns. Labour may have paraded Ann Pearston of the anti-gun Snowdrop Campaign on its conference platform (Labour even wrongly introduced her as a “Dunblane mother”) but it was the then Tory Scottish secretary Michael Forsyth, the then Tory home secretary Michael Howard and former Tory cabinet minister David Mellor who pushed the Bill through.
After Dunblane, it was Sebastian Coe – later one of William Hague’s closest advisers – who dropped his presidency of the National Pistol Association (NPA) like it was a hot brick. Watch out for those “forces of conservatism”. A pinko organisation such as the RSPCA may wring its hands about hunting and pay millions for advertisements to have it banned, but sanctimonious is as bad as Labour gets. It takes a solidly Tory group such as the National Trust ruling council under the chairmanship of Charles Nunneley actually to ban staghunting.
http://www.leadshot.com/story.asp?id=461
Steve Mace