April 21, 2005 — By Jeremy Lovell, Reuters
WROXETER, England — Rural Britons are in revolt and mounting a determined
but almost certainly doomed bid to stop Tony Blair's Labour party
winning an unprecedented third term in elections next month.
Never admirers of Labour, the hunting, shooting and fishing brigade
have been finally spurred to action by a deeply divisive ban on
fox-hunting with dogs that came into force in February.
"The ban typified everything that is wrong with this government.
It is an unnecessary and cowardly attack on a minority," said
Patrick Webster, chairman of the 170-year-old Albrighton Hunt in
the northwestern county of Shropshire.
"It has been a catalyst, turning a reservoir of pent-up anger
over the foot and mouth disaster and the loss of public services
in rural areas into a pool of energy," he told Reuters in his
home, an old farmhouse set amid yellow oilseed rape fields.
That is not to say that this historic rural haven 150 miles northwest
of London no longer echoes to the hullabaloo of hunting with blaring
horns and baying hounds. It is just that they now have to shoot
the foxes if they find them.
Blair, his personal standing in tatters over the Iraq war, goes
to the polls on May 5 in the hope of entrenching his Labour party's
161-seat majority but with some pundits predicting that huge margin
could be as much as halved.
Galvanised by the hunt ban, a body calling itself Vote-OK is targeting
more than 130 marginal Labour constituencies to support opposition
pro-rural candidates.
"We assist within the constituency when asked to," said
local organiser Clare Sawers. "We are not putting forward any
candidates of our own. At the moment it is mostly leaflets."
Although the majority of these opposition candidates are from the
right-leaning Conservative party, small regional parties are also
being supported -- the aim being to evict the sitting Labour member.
Labour has always been an urban-based party, springing out of the
industrial heartlands while the Conservatives -- who ruled Britain
for a large part of the 20th century -- have found their support
among the landed gentry and middle classes.
It is hard to see tiny Wroxeter as a battleground, but the area
is no stranger to strife, sitting on an ancient crossing of the
River Severn next to once warlike Wales and below the ruins of Viroconium
-- Roman Britain's fourth largest city.
Funeral Pyres
The stench of the funeral pyres of millions of cattle and sheep
slaughtered to stop the foot-and-mouth epidemic that briefly delayed
the last election in 2001 has gone.
But it has been replaced by smouldering anger over what is seen
as a blatant attack on the rural way of life.
Some 400,000 people took to the streets of London in 2002 to protest
at the coming hunting ban and the dilapidation of public services
in rural areas -- a particularly sore point with pensioners who
form a significant part of the electorate there.
The anger is deep in Shropshire's Wrekin constituency -- the model
for Middle Earth in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- where Labour
member of parliament Peter Bradley is a keen supporter of the ban
and also seen by many as unashamedly anti-rural.
"We ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over the Bill
was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom; it was class
war," he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph last November.
And, as with the reasons for going to war with Iraq, trust is also
a rural concern.
"They lied to us. They said it was all to do with animal welfare
but then Bradley admitted it was part of the class struggle -- them
against us," said farm college student James Tyler-Morris.
However, Wyn Grant, professor of politics at Warwick University
said the hunting ban could play well among urban voters for whom
animal welfare was an emotional issue.
"It is an emotive issue that could bring Labour voters out,"
he said.
Rural Services
But it is not just local issues that are fuelling the fires of
resentment in the countryside.
Rural Britons are just as concerned over the election's big issues
like schools, hospitals and law and order.
"We are not fooling ourselves. The farming community is just
one percent of the electorate. But there is a deeper malaise in
the country too," hunt chairman Webster said.
"We can make a difference in the marginal constituencies,
and maybe elsewhere."
"I don't think the Conservatives will win this election. But
I think there is a real chance that Labour can lose it," he
added with a fervent gleam in his eyes.
Source: Reuters
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