Banning Hunting and Government Interference

There are some very interesting legal arguments about the government's attempt to ban hunting with dogs. For example, how do you prove that someone is actually hunting. Just because you meet up at a pub (say, the Fox and Hounds...) wearing hunting pink and with a large number of dogs, horns and hunting paraphenalia, this is not proof that you are actually hunting. A Chief Constable was on 5 Live this morning saying that the police would have to see a wild mammal and also see it being hunted in order to bring a case. Considering that most hunts don't result in a kill and a lot don't even find the scent of a fox anyway, these could be very difficult cases to bring!

It is also interesting that President Tony is suddenly worried about the combined effect of the bans of hunting and smoking in public places, especially coming up to the election (probably in May). How can someone with such a vast political majority and with his opposition in such deep disarray manage to get that worried about what he is doing. Could it possibly be that he realises that in pandering to the liberal middle classes he is alienating large portions of the electorate who don't like the vast amounts of government interference in all aspects of our lives.

Let's just count up the major interferences:

• banning smoking in pubs
  
• banning hunting


• vast increases in school beaurocracy and testing for the sake of testing


• enforced metricism (if that is a word)


• vastly increased proscriptive H&S legislation

Several of these were just as bad under the Conservatives, and the H&S bits are a result of the UK having to take on bad proscriptive EU law rather than devloping our own risk-based legislation. All taken together, they show a government hell-bent on controlling every aspect of our lives. I am not necessarily arguing that some of the above are not good ideas, but each one has alienated another section of the community. Surely this is not the right way to use a massive parliamentary majority, just to force your views on others?