The lone fact that it was driven by idealists, who are notoriously blind to hard realities, sounded a warning bell that anyone with an ounce of good sense should have paid heed to while it was still far enough away to be harmlessly diverted.
The abs
urdity of the situation which now presents itself is a direct result of common sense having been diverted instead.
That situation sees the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) producing internal documents which suggest that those who flout the law, after it comes into effect on Friday, may escape arrest for the reasons that enforcing it has not been afforded a high priority and that the new law confers a power to arrest, not a duty - a nicety, incidentally, which those who framed it are unlikely to have introduced inadvertently. And far from reprimanding ACPO for making a serious misjudgment, the Home Secretary Charles Clarke has said police chiefs are right to give enforcing the ban a low priority.
Such wisdom comes a little late in the day, but wisdom it is because a pragmatic Home Secretary will have discerned the immense problems which a high-profile enforcement of the law must inevitably cause.
Not least of these would be its effect upon an otherwise law-abiding and responsible section of the rural community with whom it is far more sensible for the police to remain on good terms than to alienate. When serious rural crime is mounting, these folk are the natural allies of the police, and in areas where they are too thin on the ground to be more than a token and often ineffectual presence, the police need all the allies they can find.
Mr Clarke hopes, rather piously perhaps, that the hunting fraternity will respect the law, even when it criminalises them for something they cannot possibly conceive to be criminal.
Many hunts across Yorkshire have declared their intention to ride out with the hounds as usual on Saturday. Some packs will ostensibly be following dragged trails, but others have detected loopholes which they say will permit the dogs to chase a quarry, provided they do not dispatch it.
Small wonder ACPO has downgraded policing of this fatuous law; the prospect of officers arguing in the middle of a muddy field with a Master of Hounds as to whether the dogs running around, barking madly, are in legal or illegal pursuit of a fast-disappearing fox cannot be especially welcome – especially when there is so much serious crime to keep them more than busy.
New Labour, old tricks
Blair battles apathy
IN the euphoria of May 2, 1997, when Labour had won the biggest majority held by any government since 1935, the remark by a political commentator that all governments eventually fail seemed hardly appropriate. At that moment, many in the country who had never regarded themselves as being Labourites, were absolutely delighted that the tarnished Tories had been given a good kicking, and that the enthusiastic, fresh-faced, sincere-sounding Tony Blair with his New Labour team were now in charge.
It is a measure of how things have changed over the last eight years that while "failure" is not a word which is yet synonymous with New Labour, "apathy" is.
The question Mr Blair might ask himself is how the wave of enthusiasm which carried him and New Labour to power eight years ago has dwindled into a ripple that is so small it might as well not be there.
The apathy he detects, and against which he warned the party at its Spring Conference in Gateshead, is a fruit which he and his government have cultivated by the assiduous use of spin and all that goes with it, a fact which he showed he still fails to grasp when he brought back to his side the master of this particular art, Alastair Campbell.
Further, Alan Milburn is reported to have told Labour activists that the party must keep up its campaign of dirty tricks in order to stimulate public interest in the election, or risk see its majority wiped out by a dismally-low turn out. The robust Mr Campbell can be relied upon to bring all his experience to bear upon such a campaign, and it is hardly credible that Mr Blair is so elevated that he does not know what is going on.
He is apparently as wedded to spin as ever, and as for his declaration that he has abandoned the "I know best" approach for a true partnership with the public, he has created a mountain of suspicion to climb.
Facing, as he does, an electorate so disenchanted with politicians and the political process that record apathy is threatened at the coming General Election, he should consider if he himself has been through the self-analysis and soul-searching which he accuses Conservatives of having neglected.
All the indications are that he has not.
