Commandos of the countryside

Pro-hunting activists are gearing up for a big weekend of national protest, with the militant wing muttering darkly about sabotage and terrorist-style attacks. Is this just 'pub talk', or is something more sinister afoot? Paul Vallely investigates

You can, if you like, go to a pub in Cambridgeshire and meet a couple of dogdy characters who call themselves "countryside commandos". They will talk about Semtex and "bombing up the London sewers". If you buy them a pint of lager they may even show you a balaclava.

Or you could ask to see the security camera footage that shows a group of activists plastering "Real Countryside Alliance" posters across the offices of the anti-hunting Labour MP for Goole in East Yorkshire, the effect of which was somewhat spoiled by them getting the wrong part of the building.

Or, if you were a particularly intrepid reporter, you could ask to accompany the hunting hardliners on one of their raids. A chap from The Daily Telegraph went with Real CA activists to hang a giant red hunting coat on the back of the Angel of the North, in Gateshead. What he found when he got there was a bunch of cack-handed characters who had trouble shooting an arrow, with a line attached, over the sculpture's arms, then got the coat snagged halfway up and - despite all their talk about happily going to jail for the cause - took it down as soon as the police arrived and told them that they were committing a breach of the peace. It was, said the man from the Telegraph, "hardly an IRA- style spectacular".

The Countryside Alliance is launching another wave of protest this weekend to set the scene for the latest incarnation of the Hunting Bill that goes before the House of Lords for its second reading on Tuesday. From tomorrow, activists will be out transforming the rural landscape into a sea of red and green - red for anger, green for the countryside - with waves of posters, banners and car stickers everywhere.

Foxhounds and beagles will invade the Piazza at London's Covent Garden as their handlers lobby metropolitan passers-by about how their livelihoods and way of life will be under threat if any ban becomes law. They will talk the language of liberty and bemoan the "unjust and vindictive oppression of a minority by backbench bigots", a kind of language previously more associated with the left than with law-abiding denizens of Middle England, as they frequently style themselves.

There are some who would like them also to adopt the more extreme tactics of those who have opposed governments in the past. Look back through the newspaper files and you will see that before every Countryside Alliance demonstration - most particularly the one in 2000, when 284,000 people marched through London in defence of Hunting with Hounds, or in 2002 when 407,000 took to the streets in Britain's biggest demo ever in defence of "our rural way of life" - the same dark stories appear.

The "provisional wing" of the movement is now emerging. Militant hunt supporters are threatening to sabotage essential services, including electricity pylons, gas supplies and lorries carrying food for supermarkets. They are talking about disrupting railways and telephone lines, dumping sand into sewers to block drains, immobilising a motorway by covering it with rivets that would slash tyres, "pulling the plug out of a reservoir in Wales" and running Birmingham short of water. They will "unleash a wave of terror on animal rights supporters".

These stories all have one thing in common - well, two if you include their breathless melodrama and the striking similarity of detail which might lead a cynic to wonder whether they had all just copied from one another. After the big demo the reports dry up, and their dire prophesies all go unfulfilled.

The worst that the hunt militants get up to is spraying "Rural Rebellion" graffiti on motorway bridges and road signs. There have been three blockades of motorways by slow-moving convoys of tractors. A bus used by anti-hunt campaigners had its tyres slashed. And when they "defaced" two prehistoric white horses cut into hillsides at Kilburn and Uffingham, adding images of huntsmen, they did so using biodegradable tennis-court paint and a 120ft hunter made of carpet that they removed soon after. The most gruesome thing they did was to spear a fox through the throat and leave it hanging from a post outside the front gate of the animal lover Carla Lane, which is not nice but not exactly in the same league as the activities of some hunt saboteurs such as the ones who this week launched an arson attack on the home of the master of the South Dorset hunt.

In one sense, the hunt militants have only themselves to blame for the reports that talk about "terrorist-style attacks" on government offices by a group of extremists divided, like the IRA, into unconnected impenetrable cells. Edward Duke was briefly chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, where he is remembered as "loud, brash, and a bad listener". After he left he became associated with a hard-line splinter group, the Real CA. The name, he said, was conjured by some London PR men as a device for attracting instant media attention with its prefixing echoing that of the nasty breakaway wing of the Irish republican movement, which was responsible for the 1998 Omagh bomb in which 29 people died and 200 were injured.

"The choice of name may have been tasteless, but it was bloody effective," he now says, unrepentant. The Real CA was launched two years ago with a huge poster on one of the most visible and expensive billboards in London and an accompanying 7,000 fly-poster campaign depicting a freed balaclava-clad terrorist beside an imprisoned hunt member. It was paid for by Duke, the affluent owner of several ceramics businesses who rides with the Middleton Hunt in the Yorkshire Wolds.

Good taste cannot be said to be the strong suit of the militants. Earlier, they came up with a poster depicting the then agriculture minister, Nick Brown, as a man "who loves gays and buggers the countryside". The magazine Earth Dog, Running Dog - read by terriermen, who have lost faith in the horsey mainstream Alliance leadership - once described the black anti-hunting Labour MP Oona King, as "typical of her species", and told her to "direct her talents to advising her scrounging supporters on how to claim more handouts". Several of the pro-hunting lobby I spoke to this week made disparaging remarks about ritual slaughter of animals by Muslims.

But this is not translating to anything dramatic on the ground. "There's a lot of people who'd like to do something militant to protest at the way a minority is being walked over," says Frank Houghton Brown, master of the Middleton Hunt, where Edward Duke rides. "But at the moment I don't believe there is much happening."

"Ninety-nine per cent of it is just pub talk," says Janet George, a larger-than-life Shropshire farmer who quit the Alliance to form the more hardline Countryside Action Network, which led last year's motorway tractor convoys.

"People are very, very angry with the Government," says Brynle Williams, the Welsh farmer who led the petrol protest direct action, "but there are 101 things more important than hunting, such as farmers in Wales are not being paid their suckler-cow subsidy because of a computer glitch."

For all that, the pro-hunting lobby feels the tide is turning in its direction, in terms of opinion in the Lords, the media and the public, says Simon Hart, the Countryside Alliance's chief executive-designate. Its campaign this weekend is based around polls which show that, though most people do not actually like hunting, a majority - 59 per cent - are opposed to an outright ban.

This is an interesting turn of events. A few years ago, the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott launched a blistering attack on fox-hunters at the Labour Party Conference. "Every time I see the Countryside Alliance and their contorted faces, I redouble my determination to vote in the House of Commons to abolish fox-hunting for ever," he raged. Fox-hunters were one of the few enemies New Labour felt it was safe to have. Nowadays, with only 2 per cent of the population believing that hunting should be top of the Government's list of concerns, Tony Blair is not so sure.

He looked for a compromise - to secure a fair and workable registration scheme for all forms of hunting based on sensible tests for utility and cruelty. But his plan was scuppered after some extraordinary scenes in the Commons where the Government accepted a backbench Labour reworking it had previously described as "a wrecking amendment". The Lords is almost certain to rework the Bill next week to more closely resemble its original form but it will then run out of parliamentary time and be deemed to have been blocked, leaving Blair with the dilemma of whether to push it through under the Parliament Act that enables the will of the Commons to override the Lords. It would be only the fourth time since the Second World War the process has been used. In the end, the decision will not be about hunting. It will be about whether the Prime Minister needs to appease Labour backbenchers in revolt over Iraq, the Hutton inquiry, foundation hospitals (or whatever is the current crisis) by throwing them a totemic bone.

The hunters know they have to keep up the pressure. The Countryside Alliance is stepping up its £13m campaign. In Scotland, campaigners led by Jim Crawford have established a Countryside Party in emulation of the French CPNT (Chasse, Pêche, Nature et Tradition), which, taking advantage of France's proportional voting system, now has eight MEPs and won 1.3m votes when its leader stood against Jacques Chirac in the presidential election.

Others are talking more militantly in their determination to show they are the people of Britain who have not spoken yet. "If we get to the point when Tony Blair says he is going to invoke the Parliament Act, then civil disobedience will follow," threatens Edward Duke. "We're law-abiding citizens but we'll disobey an unjust law."

For a start, hunting will continue. "We'll restructure it to make policing unworkable," says Janet George. "Hunts will become co-operatives so that there are no leaders to prosecute. Everyone will carry a horn. Ownership of kennels will be put in offshore trusts. Each hound will be made a child's pet. Farmers will sign declarations that only drag hunting is allowed on their land. Riders will switch hunts all the time. If the police come, everyone will hand over all their horses and hounds. We'll make it so they can't cope."

Militants also plan to withhold a proportion of taxes, Duke says. And they will conduct a campaign of public harassment of anti-hunting MPs and ministers. "We will be aggressive with those MPs who are so vindictive and bigoted that they are never going to be open to rational debate and are just behaving like elected dictators," he says. "We will block in their cars, chant in their surgeries and heckle them wherever they go."

There is nothing illegal, he points out, about slow-moving convoys of farm vehicles on motorways or across every bridge in London. But threats to reservoirs, power and gas supplies, and disrupting food supplies to supermarkets would be "totally unacceptable", he says. "The idea that we're into terrorism is just absolute crap by journalists pushing for a story. We're the stalwarts of Middle England and serious breaches of existing laws are not an option. If we did that we'd be stooping to the level of the hunt saboteurs." He admits of one exception. The idea of leaving "not a single speed camera working in Britain", he laughs, is very attractive since it would not alienate the general public and would hit at the Government and at its revenue.

Are such threats as serious a problem as unrest on the Labour backbenches? That is the judgement Tony Blair now must make.