Farmers, hunters march for 'Liberty and Livelihood' {LANDGRAB}

Farmers, hunters march
for 'Liberty and Livelihood'
Huge turnout expected today for biggest civil liberties protest in British history

Posted: September 22, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Sarah Foster
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

Crowds expected to number in the hundreds of thousands are descending on London from all parts of the British Isles, to be joined by supporters from other countries, for what its sponsors predict will be the biggest protest march ever held in Britain.

The coordinating Countryside Alliance, an umbrella organization, expects over 300,000 demonstrators, with some estimates going as high as 500,000 or even 1 million. They're arriving by train, plane, car and chartered bus.

Beginning at 10 a.m., they will meet at two different points, then march in columns 40 abreast, to converge near Whitehall for a march to the Houses of Parliament. Their banner will be Liberty and Livelihood, a theme chosen to rally groups and individuals of widely disparate interests and concerns: farmers, hunters, anglers, business-owners, landowners, tradesmen, mechanics, outdoor recreationists, and others who depend on rural Britain for work and recreation.

They are people who live in what in the United States has been called "fly-over country" – the rural areas that politicians ignore in their travels to the cities where the big blocks of votes are. The concerns expressed by the marchers are sure to resonate with their American counterparts.

"The people of the countryside are very, very angry because they realize that there's something wrong with the country," explained Tim Bonner, a former poultry farmer and now a media spokesperson for the alliance. "The people of the countryside see that there are so many problems that need to be sorted out which are being completely ignored. That's why there will be such huge numbers of people in London on Sunday. There will be the sort of numbers that no other organization – political, a charity, anyone else – can come anywhere close to matching as far as demonstrations are concerned."

"We expect it will be the biggest civil liberties demonstration in British history," he said.

The London press reports that although most Labor members of Parliament are expected to shun the demonstration, over 100 Conservative MPs are joining the march, including shadow cabinet leader Iain Duncan Smith, to demonstrate their party's support for the protesters. Former leader William Hague will also take part.

Prince Charles and other members of the royal family have indicated they will not attend.

This is the second demonstration sponsored by the Countryside Alliance. The first, held March 1, 1998, drew some 280,000 protestors. Although the central issue of each protest is the Labor government's attempt to ban foxhunting with hounds, this demonstration like its predecessor has only partially to do with foxhunting and everything to do with the overall state of rural England.

Bonner is therefore chagrined that this march – like the former – is being interpreted by some in the media as being essentially a pro-hunting demonstration.

Not just about hunting

"It's so much more than that," he exclaimed. "Prices for farm products are dropping. Thousands of farmers are going out of business every year, public services are being cut, and the government – our New Labor, actually a semi-socialist government – is obsessed with banning foxhunting. That's about the only thing they want to do. And foxhunting is really a minority activity carried out by relatively few people. Some of them happen to be very, very rich, which is why it's being seen as a class issue."

Bonner, 31, is married with three children, and is himself one of the casualties of the economic depression he described that is devastating rural communities. Until recently he owned a farm in Devon, a county in southwest England, which he bought eight years ago. There, he and his wife raised poultry for free-range egg production. In 2000 he planted a grove of poplar trees so their 9,000 hens would have shade. Once the trees had matured, he planned to harvest them for timber.

When Bonner began egg farming he received 75p a dozen, but that fell to 62p a dozen as the cost of living rose. "That's why I had to give it up," he said. "There's just no light at the end of the tunnel. I'm lucky because there are other things I can do, so I'm doing them. But I worry about my friends and neighbors who have been farming all their lives."

Today's march is the culmination of two years of planning by the Alliance. It was heralded the night of Sept. 16 by the lighting of at least 3,000 giant bonfires from northern Scotland to the south coast of England.

"It's traditional in this country – from the times the Vikings invaded all through history – that whenever there was a threat, beacons were lighted so people could warn each other," Bonner explained. "[Monday] night a lot of very old beacon sites all over the country were lighted."

A warning shot

Following the bonfire lightings, a rocket relay was held that stretched from Scotland through the fields of Cumbria to London. Cumbria, the most northern county of England, bordering Scotland, was particularly savaged by last year's foot-and-mouth crisis, with the slaughtering and burning of sheep and cattle.

As described by the Cumberland News a few days before the event, "… on Monday night when the night skies are ablaze with beacons and bonfires, there will be a rocket relay to symbolise the unified unrest in the countryside – firing a warning shot that the people of Cumbria are on their way to London on the 22nd."

And that is how it was. In London, a group of members of the Countryside Alliance "lighted" a simulated bonfire outside the House of Commons and fired rockets in Parliament Square. The Morning News reported that Alliance activists have mounted a continuous 24-hour vigil, seven days a week, for several months "to show that rural communities are not going to be flattened into submission by what they perceive to be a largely hostile and unsympathetic Government."

Miles away to the south in Somerset County, another area hit hard by disease, Exmoor cattle farmer Guy Thomas-Everard, 31, took part in a bonfire lighting – one of hundreds in his area. Somerset and the neighboring county of Devon, like Cumbria, were hit particularly hard by foot-and-mouth disease.

"We are not only alerting country people to the impending danger to their liberties and livelihood, but we are alerting London to the fact that we are on our way," Thomas-Everhard said at the gathering, the West Country Daily News reported.

Contacted for comment, Thomas-Everard described the scene to WorldNetDaily, noting that there were beacons on every hill but the one that is owned by a private conservation group. He said about a hundred people were at the bonfire he lighted.

"It was a clear night, so you could see an awful lot of bonfires around on the various hilltops; it was quite something," he recalled and added, "Rather annoyingly, the highest point here on Exmoor is owned by the National Trust, and the National Trust has said they would not have bonfires about the march on their land because they felt it was a demonstration that they didn't want to be associated with. … It was certainly noticeable that night. You could see bonfires on every hilltop except for one gaping black hole to the north of us, which is on National Trust land."

Thomas-Everard, a fourth-generation Exmoor hill farmer, has a special reason for both celebration and anger with the government. He was a near-casualty of the foot-and-mouth slaughter in May 2001, when the Ministry of Agriculture, Fishing and Forestry wanted to slaughter his livestock. But he fought and he won, though to keep MAFF from his property he had to block the entrances with a cattle truck and farm equipment.

In brief, Thomas-Everard has two farms of 500 acres each, where he raises cattle and sheep. He employs a total of six people – tractor drivers, a herd manager, and stock managers.

As he told a European Union committee earlier this year, "In May of last year MAFF were insistent that my stock should be slaughtered. I disagreed with MAFF's assessment of the need to slaughter my stock, and as a consequence I refused to give my consent to have my healthy stock slaughtered. After a standoff of seven days, MAFF backed down and I saved my herd from an unnecessary slaughter and the taxpayer from having to spend between 1.5 - 2 million pounds in compensation. There was much media interest in my position, partly because there were a large number of cattle involved and because my wife and I were due to marry on 19th May."

At the time of the confrontation, Thomas-Everard had 920 cattle on the one farm, and 60 on the other and 300 ewes.

"As I explained to the European Inquiry, a farm worker [Robert Norman] had come on the farm, and his cattle subsequently went down with foot-and-mouth, and they thought that was a strong enough link to justify slaughtering all our cattle," Thomas-Everard explained to WorldNetDaily.

But Norman had come on the farms on April 26 and had not moved his own cattle and exposed them to the virus until April 28 – two days after he had been on Thomas-Everhard's farms. During the course of his work Norman went on a total of 15 farms – and MAFF assumed these became contaminated as well.

MAFF 'panicked'

In Thomas-Everard's view, the ministry "panicked." Officials didn't ask [Norman] for details about where he went, "They just said, 'You've had foot-and-mouth, give us the list of any farm you've been onto in the last two weeks,' and they slaughtered those farms out. They didn't check to see the specific dates and specific circumstances of his visits to those farms. Had they done so at the start we wouldn't have had the battle and they wouldn't have raised the slaughter notice."

His battle with MAFF is one of the reasons Thomas-Everard and his wife Julia will be marching today, "This country had the worst-handled crisis of foot-and-mouth in the world, and yet we never had a public inquiry. The European Union is conducting one, but that's not the same thing," he said.

"It was a huge bungle, and the sickening thing is that no one [in government] is prepared to admit that it was a bungle and they're doing their best to cover that up," he said.

"It's a weird thing," he noted. "I don't know if it's the same in America, but here now if a doctor makes a mistake there's a huge public outcry. He gets really vilified by the press and by the politicians. Yet if a politician makes a mistake, oh, that's just an exceptional thing and with benefit of hindsight it might have been done differently. But no one ever makes an apology, and no one is ever actually really made to mend their ways, if you like."

But "bungling" of the foot-and-mouth crisis is not the only reason the couple are marching. Even without foot-and-mouth, they'd be there anyway.

"It's a march showing of vast numbers, of people who are sick and tired of the government's twisted priorities," he observed. "The government's exceeding their power in banning hunting and not doing anything about the problems faced by agriculture and the problems of rural poverty. We have the worst agricultural depression since the 1930s, and what's the government's answer? To ban foxhunting."

But for some, the mishandling of the foot-and-mouth outbreak is the main reason for being there. Janet Bayley, coordinator of the National Foot and Mouth Group, a group of scientists, sympathetic politicians and others that has been pressuring for a public hearing, will be there with other FMD activists. They'll carrying helium-filled balloons that say simply, "We're here because of Foot and Mouth."

"Never again must the UK deal with an animal disease in the way it dealt with Foot and Mouth," says the NFMG in a press release.

"We just don't feel the government's learnt any lessons from foot-and-mouth at all," Bayley explained to WorldNetDaily. "It's a year since the foot-and-mouth crisis ended here, and there has been no change. They haven't taken up the Royal Society's [of Edinburgh] recommendations for vaccination. There has been no indication that the government intends to put in place vaccination. We've heard nothing back from them after the Royal Society Report. If we have another outbreak of foot-and-mouth today, they could deal with it in exactly the same way as they did in 2001."

"That's the first concern," said Bayley. "The next concern is that there wasn't a proper inquiry here. We never had any critical analysis of the epidemiological data derived from the outbreak. [The government] never proved that what they did was actually the right thing to do, and yet they intend to proceed with the Animal Health Bill and not have any further debate on it. And the Animal Health Bill does in fact extend the powers of seizing and slaughtering that the minister already has. He needs only to think an animal has been exposed [to a disease] and that's it.

"So not only have they failed to act on the Royal Society Report, but we've still got this draconian bill heading towards us to taken up in October."

As reported by WorldNetDaily, the Animal Health Bill was temporarily shelved in March, but expected to be brought up in the autumn.

Bayley and her group are hoping to alert people to the pending legislation and to keep the issue of foot-and-mouth alive until the government makes meaningful changes in policy.

'Beacons Across the World'

The protesters today are being joined by sympathizers from around the world. Most seem to be from the foxhunting community, but they are well aware of the deeper issues. Representatives from at least 16 hunt groups from the United States are to be there.

Also, on Monday the bonfires went international as "Beacons Across the World" were lighted in Canada, Ireland, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, and at least 27 American states.

Because of drought in many areas, substitutions had to be made. In New Hampshire, Rhonda Watts, an elementary school teacher and horse lover, knew she could not get a fire permit, so her beacon was a torch of kerosene-soaked rags tied to a long pole, which was planted in the middle of her horse pasture.

"It certainly was not a large crowd," she said in an e-mail. "Just my horses and me this time. Still, I felt I had to display my support, however small the actual emblem was, and however it may have been lacking in public notice."

Watts added, "I am far from one of the 'landed gentry' some would envision foxhunters to be. I'm an elementary school teacher. Horses and hunting have been a big part of my whole life. I live and work on the family farm, not work out at the gym. My students learn that George Washington was an avid foxhunter, as well as learning how foxhunting benefits the fitness of the species, while remaining the one and only means of control in which the quarry either is killed quickly and cleanly or escapes unscathed."

Dennis Foster, executive director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association of America, will be marching in the London demonstration. He belongs to three international committees, "trying to get organizations together to realize that we're all going to be affected" [by anti-hunting legislation].

Like other marchers, Foster is concerned about the emphasis on foxhunting, which while an important issue is not the only one, and he lists several – some of which have parallels to agendas being implemented in the United States.

"The only issue you hear about is the hunting issue. But there are much bigger ones," he said. "Blair is trying to open up the greenbelts to construction. The idea is to have room for more housing. He wants to give the urban environment more housing. There are large areas that are part of what makes England pretty – farmland and so forth. Blair wants to have the farming go to Europe or South America, because he doesn't think it's profitable. And he wants to keep the areas along the roads for people to look at them and they can have tourism.

"They also have Right to Roam laws, which means anybody can go anywhere they want to go, whether its private land or not."

Indeed, the Right to Roam laws were fought, unsuccessfully, by British farmers. These laws give hikers the right to wander across farms and pastures, as though a farmer's yard is a public park. Blair considers the legislation a triumph of his administration.

"So there are just a lot of different issues not just dealing with hunting," Foster said. "There're all country-related issues of people who live in rural parts of the country and being set upon by an urban majority that doesn't understand."

Foster did not discuss the animal rights movement with WorldNetDaily, but in a press release he made some telling points about the legislation pending in Parliament, and its potential impact in the United States.

"The urban majority (97 percent) who have unrealistic views about animal behavior, will dictate to a country minority (who live with wild and domestic animals daily), how they must conduct their lives," he writes. "The bill would give government the right to interfere with the personal and legal habits of its people and substitute political correctness for individual conscience.

"Animal Rights groups are pouring vast amounts of money into this battle. Prime Minister Blair received over $1.6 million from animal rights groups. The International Fund for Animals, headquartered in Boston, Mass., is quoted by the British press to have spent more than $12 million in their attempt to outlaw hunting with dogs."

Foster adds: "The anti-hunting with hounds issue is just one of the issues on their agenda that affects country lifestyles and liberty. … This is not about animal welfare, as there are sufficient laws that when properly enforced protect animals. This is about human rights, intolerance, freedom, liberty and the practice of giving politicians large financial rewards to implement special interest group desires."

THIS article at WND

Sue Olsen, 52, said: "What's happening to British agriculture is the same process we went through 15 years ago in Australia. Out government didn't listen to us but hopefully your government will listen to these people."

All, And, the above from "Thousands march for countryside" on the BBC this morning. We are NOT alone in this land grab by godgov and their "partner" NGOs as highlighted in the main story. Peace and love, George.

Stop government land grabs, NOW !!

Death To all Tyrant's !!

Freedom Is Worth Fighting For !!

Molon Labe !!

It's pretty obvious that the rural folks in England have irreconcilable differences with the socialist politicians and urbanites in England.

It's also obvious that many city-dwellers here in the US despise our private property Rights and legacy of individual Freedom. We Americans could do without these losers.

The Bush administration should begin negotiations with the corrupt British regime to work out a "citizen swap", which would be completely voluntary.

Rural Brits, who so chose, could become US citizens and be given gov't lands in proportion to the size and value of the lands they owned in England.

Likewise, American citizens who love European socialism more than love individual Freedom, could be given a government-subsidized apartment in Britian along with their new citizenship.

Blair and his marxist pals could get their farmland, as well as new "slaves" for their urban areas. We get men and women who love Freedom, and get rid of many "domstic enemies of the Constitution". And all of the folks who relocate are happy. A win-win-win situation.

I met Sarah Foster last year at the headgate (Klamath Falls) and helped her a much as I could. Watch for future articles by her.

Gee, a journalist that actually gets her hands dirty and does her job. What's this world coming to?

Hopefully to the right! can't stand a socialist/communist trying to force their agenda down my throat. Good thing we went out and practiced our second amendment rights yesterday....had to drive a whole three miles to get to our "practice area" here on the desert.

"Blair and his marxist pals could get their farmland, as well as new "slaves" for their urban areas. We get men and women who love Freedom, and get rid of many "domstic enemies of the Constitution". And all of the folks who relocate are happy. A win-win-win situation."

M, I LIKE IT!!! Now, how do we sell it, and to whom do we make the pitch? Peace and love, George.

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