Hunting ban was 'a disaster' admits Blair in astonishing memoirs

Hunting ban was 'a disaster' admits Blair in astonishing memoirs




Hunt campaigners called for the immediate lifting of the ban yesterday after Tony Blair admitted it was a "disaster."

In an astonishing revelation, the former Prime Minister said it would have been "less trouble" to propose culling every fifth pensioner than the outrage sparked by the Hunting Act.

Mr Blair says it is the introduction of the ban – rather than war with Iraq or the cash for honours probe – that he "most regrets" from his time in power.

His opponents in the Westcountry have labelled the Act one of the "most illiberal, ineffective and wasteful laws of modern times" and say that the former Prime Minister's confessions must spell its end.

In his memoir, A Journey, Mr Blair claims to have deliberately sabotaged the 2004 Hunting Act to ensure there were enough loopholes to allow hunting to continue.

Describing it as a "masterly British compromise", Mr Blair claimed the Act left people able to hunt foxes "provided certain steps were taken to avoid cruelty when the fox was killed."

He says he also told then-Home Office minister Hazel Blears to steer police away from enforcing the law.

The sensational memoirs also reveal how Mr Blair blames a "maddening" Gordon Brown for Labour's landslide election defeat, feels "anguish" over the Iraq war and developed an unhealthy relationship with alcohol during his time in office.

The book, published yesterday, has provoked a scornful reaction across the Westcountry among former Labour MPs, hunt campaigners and members of the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS).

Even one of Mr Blair's previous allies, former Plymouth Sutton & Devonport MP Linda Gilroy, said she was "disappointed" with the ex-Premier concerning his comments about Mr Brown.

The Countryside Alliance yesterday called Mr Blair "delusional" and "completely duplicitous" while the LACS accused him of virtually perverting the course of justice.

Mr Blair claims he had not realised how passionate the hunting community was about the ban, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of hunt supporters storming London in 2002.

"The passions aroused by the issue were primeval," he said. "If I'd proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I'd have got less trouble. By the end of it, I felt like the damn fox.

"I had a complete lapse. I didn't 'feel it' either way. I didn't feel how, for fox hunters, this was part of their way of life. I didn't feel how, for those wanting a ban, this was fundamentally about cruelty. Result? Disaster."

Mr Blair said he also had a bet with Prince Charles that fox hunting would continue: "He thought the ban was absurd and raised the issue with me in a slightly pained way," he said. "The wager was that after I left office, people would still be hunting."

The former Prime Minister said he initially agreed to a ban without properly understanding the issue.

He says he was pinned down on the topic on TV and should have shut it down "at the outset". Instead, he gave the impression it would be banned and boxed himself into a corner. "I was defined, and so trapped," he said.

He later claims he only understood the issue after meeting the mistress of a hunt while on holiday in Italy: "She took me calmly and persuasively through what they did, the jobs that were dependent on it, the social contribution of keeping the hunt and the social consequence of banning it and did it with an effect that completely convinced me," Mr Blair said.

Prime Minister David Cameron has described the law as a "farce" and said MPs would have the chance to vote on a parliamentary motion later in the year on whether to hold a free vote on the ban.

Graham Higgins, Master of the East Cornwall Hunt, said: "It always was a bad law. That is why so many hundreds of thousands of us went to London when the vote was being taken. You just don't get that amount of people who are wrong about something so close to their hearts and to the heart of the countryside.

"I'm pleased that Tony Blair has written this in his memoirs. It just goes to show that at the time we were right, and all of those people who voted for it were wrong and they knew it.

"It has been a pointless law, a waste of police time and has made innocent countryside people into criminals. When the person who brought it in admits it was a mistake that means it is high time to put a stop to it."

A spokesman for The Countryside Alliance said: "Mr Blair's memories of the birth of the Hunting Act will differ wildly to the memories of all who campaigned and demonstrated to save hunting.

"Blair describes the Act as a 'masterly British compromise' despite it being nothing of the sort, and nothing like what his Government designed. Mr Blair owns up to making a huge mistake in allowing the Hunting Act onto the Statute Book, but he can't kid himself or any of the rest of us that what exists now was a deliberate piece of subtle law making.

"The Hunting Act is a product of fudge, political expediency, class war and cowardice. It is bad law, but the fact that Mr Blair let it happen knowing it would be, makes it worse, not better."

The League Against Cruel Sports said Mr Blair's "change of heart" on hunting ignored the findings of his own government's inquiry.

Barrister John Cooper QC, chairman of the charity, described the admission as "remarkable", adding: "It is alarming in the extreme that the prime minister should respond to the proper passage of an Act through parliament by not encouraging its enforcement. He is sailing perilously close to perverting the course of justice."

Douglas Batchelor, the league's chief executive, said: "Thankfully, the police ignored any instruction to ignore the law, and there's an average of one conviction every fortnight."


Hunt campaigners called for the immediate lifting of the ban yesterday after Tony Blair admitted it was a "disaster."