(no subject)

[juliet]

Hurrah! About bloody time.

[raises celebratory glass to the foxes]

(sadly I haven't seen our local foxes today - presumably they are hiding from the Nasty Rain, & fair play to 'em. Not that, of course, hunting was ever going to be an issue in their lives)

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

And good grief but that man Gray is an illiterate. It's "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war".

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

And you didn't think him calling it a "rank bad bill" was ugly enough phrasing, then?

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Well quite. Anyway, I just stitched up our local Tories so badly that I fear for my personal safety when they find out what I've done, but... must keep it secret until mid-December :(

[juliet]

And the CA further demonstrate their ignorance here, where they claim that the Parliament Act means that 'a government could legislate to rule for ever'. In fact, I believe you'll find that the Parliament Act 1911 specifically excluded applications to keep a government going beyond the 5 years, for which both houses still have to agree.

I cannot understand this claim that using the PA 1911 makes the PA 1949 illegal. The PA 1911 *changed the procedure* for passing a bill. Using said changed procedure to change the procedure again is entirely & clearly legitimate. Morons.

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

*grin* I thought that :)

[juliet]

Yeah, well, we all know that James Gray is a prat.

(& see above comment re CA latest demonstration of ignorance)

[reddragdiva]

I hope that bill can be amended in reasonable order. It's a good idea, but the wording is particularly lacking in robustness.

[juliet]

? In what way? It's extremely unlikely to be amended in any way at this stage - god knows it's had enough time spent on it already, & to amend it now would require a further Bill, which would doubtless go through the same tortuous procedure.

[reddragdiva]

e.g. if you have a dog and it kills a mouse, you've technically violated the bill. Such a prosecution is realistically unlikely to go forward, most judges not in fact being on crack, but the bill is a bit crappily put together.

I expect sanity amendments will have an easier time than the original bill.

[juliet]

Not true. The definition of 'hunting' applies in any case where:

"a) a person engages or participates in the pursuit of a wild mammal, and
b) one or more dogs are employed in that pursuit (whether or not by him and whether or not under his control or direction); or
c) a person engages or participates in a hare coursing event."

(from Hansard - this isn't the Bill that actually passed, which removed all the gumph about registration, but this bit didn't change)

So if you set your dog on a mouse, then you'd be hunting; if your dog went skiting off on its own accord, then not. Now, I'll accept that this *does* leave a bit of a loophole for people saying "weren't me Guv, I didn't tell it to", but that's true of any other offence where intent is important. It is then for the courts to decide whether the evidence is that you were doing it deliberately or otherwise.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

I think my cat Tom has mixed feelings on the matter; but then again he's the ome who had a chunk of his scalp ripped out by one of the neighbourhood foxes recently.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

I blame London foxes. My father has four cats and two foxes and all are regularly in the garden, sometimes at the same time, with no problems.

[conflux.livejournal.com]

...and a glass for the mink too perhaps?

[juliet]

And the hare & the deer, yes indeed. But the foxes were the figureheads throughout - everything else just fell into place behind that, basically.

(there was some concern about mink, for a while, but we got past that a while back).

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

RAh!!!! *resists urge to shout at anyone even vaguely anti ban ... drunk... must sleep now....*

[ottah.livejournal.com]

Excellent news :)

[(Anonymous)]

So now for the last time in our national life we have enjoyed the hue and cry, the picturesque spectacle of the unreasonable in full pursuit of the indefensible.

It's a sad day for Hansard addicts.

HTFB