The latest of Rod Liddle’s diatribes will come as no surprise to anyone who recalls how he was sacked as editor of the Today programme after a gloriously chippy rant about our supporters in his Guardian column. But the distortion of opinion research needs to be exposed.
Firstly he claims that ‘badgers are rarely cleanly shot’, which is untrue. But if he believes it, how does he justify his support for the hunting ban? The case for the ban was made (without any evidence whatsoever) that shooting foxes was preferable in terms of welfare than hunting them. If he is now persuaded that shooting medium-sized mammals is inherently cruel, will he join us in campaigning for the end of the ban on the humane use of hounds for fox management?
Secondly his claims about hunting, badger culling and the general election are supported only by those who think Twitter provides an accurate cross-section of public attitudes. Ipsos MORI has been running tracker polling on the issues which affect people’s votes for decades, and has never recorded more than 1 per cent of people saying their vote would be affected by ‘animal welfare’ issues.
When we asked people to compare the impact of hunting on their vote with other issues, hunting had less impact than wind farms, green-belt development, mobile phone connectivity, animal welfare and HS2. There was one issue which mattered marginally less to voters: badger culling. The claim that fox hunting ranked alongside immigration and economic competence in deciding people’s votes is not just evidentially wrong, it is embarrassing.
Tim Bonner is chief executive of the Countryside Alliance. His letter appears in this week’s Spectator
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