Anti-hunt supporters launch election strategy

Anti-hunt campaigners were today launching their General Election campaign plans aimed at ending the ‘‘sick culture’’ of animal cruelty.

Labour MP Tony Banks, who is in the forefront of the battle, will be unveiling a League Against Cruel Sports campaign video, Chaos in the countryside - the secret face of hunting exposed, at a Westminster news conference.

The video includes secret filming of badger and fox baiting as well as dealing with the issues of deer and fox hunting and hare coursing.

Douglas Batchelor, chief executive of the League Against Cruel Sports, said he was confident the Government would not ignore their message.

‘‘What I find particularly shocking is looking at the terrible things that can happen to animals in hunting.

‘‘It is a sick culture and if you can do that to animals then you can do it to humans. It is time it was banned,’’ he said.

The league will be targeting seats with pro-hunting candidates and areas where tactical voting is likely to be significant.

They hope the Prime Minister will promise in Labour’s manifesto to give MPs another free vote on outlawing hunting with hounds.

MPs backed the option to criminalise foxhunting - one of three choices in the Government’s highly controversial Hunting Bill.

But peers voted to allow hunters to regulate themselves, while the Middle Way option of statutory licensed hunting was rejected by both the Commons and the Lords.

The all party group of MPs who masterminded the Middle Way option are to set up a select committee in the new Parliamentary session to find out why their proposals failed to attract enough support.

Mr Batchelor said the Middle Way option ‘‘is politically dead and is going nowhere because it is a licence to be cruel to animals’’.

The Bill, which is still in the Lords, will ‘‘die’’ because Parliament is dissolved for the General Election next week.

But animal welfare campaigners want it to be re-introduced if Labour wins and for Parliament to be given another chance to ban hunting.

Tony Blair would have to use the Parliament Act to steamroller the Bill through to law if peers continued to oppose a hunting ban.

The Act is not by convention used on bills where a free vote is allowed for a conscience issue, of which Hunting is such a case.

But this precedent was broken when the Government last year forced through the Bill lowering the gay age of consent to 16, in defiance of the House of Lords who rejected it.