The British government is intensifying its attacks on rural life, following its draconian inheritance tax raid policy, rolling out fresh plans to restrict shotgun ownership further and to eliminate the traditional vestiges of rural sport by even banning pretend fox hunting.
Britain’s left-wing Labour government has announced what it calls an animal welfare strategy, in which it says it will ban trail or drag hunting — a simulated fox hunt in which hounds pursue an artificial trail instead of real prey — because critics claim the trail is used as a pretext to hunt secretly. Supporters of the trail hunting community call the announcement an expression of authoritarianism and a declaration of “war on the countryside”.
Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds said: “This government is delivering the most ambitious animal welfare strategy in a generation. Our strategy will raise welfare standards for animals in the home, on the farm and in the wild.”
In the United Kingdom, the centuries-old tradition of fox hunting is now essentially vestigial or skeuomorphic, the actual practice having been outright banned by the previous Labour government in 2004 and the ‘Conservative’ governments that followed having done nothing whatsoever to reverse that act of war on the rural by the urban in its 14 years in power. While the traditions and ritual survive, it is only through the practice of what is called trail hunting, where an artificial scent is laid ahead of the pack of hounds so no real animals are harmed, in line with the law.
Vestigal or not, hunting remains a key social centre of gravity in the British countryside and the attack on it has been decried as an act of snobbery by urban elites. Brexit leader Nigel Farage replied, “Labour are authoritarian control freaks,” and Welsh Conservative Andrew RT Davies said the proposed rules are a “spiteful attack on rural communities by urban elites”.
The Abergavenny Chronicle reports Davies said the fact Labour were moving fast on trail hunting — which is not real hunting — while the government seemed disinterested in tackling the illegal and damaging sport of hare coursing shows “the real motive behind this ban. It’s not animal welfare. It’s a spiteful attack on the rural way of life.”
Davies said: “This policy is being imposed by urban elites who neither understand nor care for the countryside”.
The Countryside Alliance, a British mass-membership non-profit supporting rural interests, said in response to the announcement, reports Sky News: “Why does the government want a war with the countryside? Trail hunting supports hundreds of jobs and is central to many rural communities. After its attack on family farms, the government should be focusing on addressing issues that actually help rural communities thrive, rather than pursuing divisive policies that hinder them.”
Meanwhile, the government is pushing ahead with its inheritance raid tax on family farms, which critics say will inevitably destroy the historic food-producing institutions as the present generation of farmers die out, as well as with a crackdown on shotgun ownership. A public consultation is forthcoming in the new year over changes the government has made clear it wants to merge the Section 1 Firearms Certificate (FAC) with the Section 2 Shotgun Certificate.
Countryside advocates have warned rolling the two types of guns into one set of paperwork would make shotgun ownership considerably more difficult to achieve without doing anything to further protect the public from gun crime. The British Association of Shooting and Conservation this week hailed their petition against the change reaching 100,000 signatures and said:
The Home Office claims that merging shotgun and rifle licensing will improve public safety, but the evidence simply doesn’t support this. Fatalities involving legally held guns are already extraordinarily rare – around 1 in 15 million annually. This figure is far below the Health and Safety Executive’s intervention threshold of 1 in a million. And because the public safety test is already identical for Section 1 and Section 2 firearms, combining the systems delivers no new safety benefit – only more bureaucracy.
…Since controls on firearms were introduced in 1920, Parliament has always distinguished between shotguns and rifles, not only because they’re as different as bicycles and motorbikes, but because shotguns in rural areas are often a ‘tool of the job’, plus widely used for recreation such as clay shooting, wildfowling and game shooting.
They said: “We shoot because we enjoy the countryside, the company and the food. We are forced into political action because some politicians are poorly informed about the benefits of what we do and are pushing for changes that would damage our way of life.”
The Countryside Alliance also warned of the additional administrative burden the government was to inadvertently place itself under by rolling the many shotgun owners into the system for the comparatively niche rifle-owning hobby:
The expected proposal of alignment with firearms would bestow a considerable additional administrative burden upon police firearms licensing units, which are already stretched to capacity. The financial and logistical burden on gun owners and traders would likewise be substantial and would cause significant damage to the rural economy, conservation efforts and communities across the country, but especially in the more remote parts of Britain.
…The law is already the same for background, suitability and medical checks conducted by licensing authorities in advance of issuing licences, whether Section 1 firearms or Section 2 shotgun. Therefore, alignment of Section 2 with Section 1 would not improve public safety.
A Times report from earlier in 2025 states the government is even considering more extreme measures, such as banning people from keeping firearms in their own safes at home at all, meaning they would have to be picked up from a gun club or shop for sporting events. It was noted this would be a serious problem for farmers who use shotguns to defend their crops and livestock from predation on a daily basis and typically at extremely short notice, warning: “Farmers risk watching their livestock being killed or injured under proposed new controls on keeping shotguns”.
Last month, a tractor protest — already a well-familiar sight in many European states — rolled into Westminster to protest the forthcoming anti-farm inheritance tax raid due to commence in April. The police responded by handcuffing and arresting farmers. Farage’s Reform UK vowed to “provide full legal support to every farmer protesting peacefully today.”
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