I don't do politics but..........

There are 268 hunts in England Wales and they all met yesterday, singly or jointly, to create 170 meets country wide. I attended the joint meet of the Meynell and South Staffs, Staffordshire Moorland, Dove Valley Mink Hounds and the Staffordshire, Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Beagles.
The Meynall and the Staffs Moorland hunt fox and have mounted fields, the traditional stereotype. the Dove Valley hunt mink, as the name suggest, and are followed on foot, the S.D.&N. hunt hare and are follwed on foot.
I do not hunt. I have been to a few meets and have foot followed fox hounds, mink hounds and beagles on several occasions but not with any regularity or great gusto. So why go to a meet yesterday?
In the last 2 elections Labour has accepted over one and a quarter million pounds from the Political Animal Lobby, a lobby comprised of anti hunting organisations.
Tony Blair has promised that his government will not persue similar courses of action against shooting and angling but his political paymasters in the Animal Liberation Front, the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, International Fund for Animal Welfare etc.( members of P.A.L.) already have campaigns running. Shoot days and angling competitions are disrupted and participants subjected to the same abuse and intimidation that hunt followers and supporters have endured by the same anti fox hunting/ animal rights campaigners whose element include arsonists and grave robbers.
(The bones of Alice Hammond have never been recovered. 72 when she died, this summer just gone her grave was robbed in a bid to stop a farming relative breeding guinea pigs for medical research by animal rights campaigners.)
If a ban on hunting costs just over a million pounds how much will a ban on shooting cost?
The government has already tried to make it more difficult to buy, own or use guns.
Tony Blair promised that any legslation against hunting would be based on evidence not opinion but when his own government enquires concluded that a ban on fox hunting would not be beneficial and in some ways it would actually be detrimental he blithely ignored the findings.
Tony Blair said the work to ban hunting was about animal welfare not class warfare but his own M.P.s have admitted they weren't bothered about foxes just in sticking one to the 'toffs'. One M.P. actually said it was 'one for the miners' to which it is rumoured members of the Banwen Miners Hunt replied 'Oh Thank You very much, first we lose our jobs now you take away our sport'
Tony Blair needed support from the back benches for his war in Iraq. The same backbenchers who opposed him on Iraq also wanted a ban on hunting and Tony Blair got the support he needed.
I went that joint meet yesterday for the same reason I attended the Countryside Rally with 120,000 other people in Hyde Park 10 July 1997. I went for the same reason I marched through London on 18 March, 2001 (220,000) and on 22 September 2002 (477,000)
I went becuase I see the ban on hunting as symptomatic of a government that can be bought, of a government that is willing to sacrifice whoever and whatever it needs to get it's own way. A government that lies and thinks people are too stupid to notice. A government that says it is dedicated to civil liberty (particulalry for minorities but seemingly only those minorities it likes or will win them votes come May), but is slowly eroding basic civil liberties such as trial by jury and no detainment without charge.
I went because it is my way of standing up and saying I can not be fooled and I will not give in.