Special Branch 'is paying for agents inside hunts' - Telegraph - Daniel Foggo and Melissa Kite - Special Branch is trying to recruit hunt members as paid informants before the sport becomes illegal next year...Brian Fanshaw, the chairman of the Council of Hunting Associations, said: "This is the quickest way of divorcing the police from hunting people."

Government finally admits: hunt ban is part of the class struggle - Melissa Kite - Telegraph - A member of the Government admits today that the hunting ban is driven by old-fashioned class warfare and is, at its heart, a bitter battle for control of Britain.

Peter Bradley, the parliamentary private secretary to Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, 51, admits that he personally sees the campaign to save hunting as an assault on his right to govern as a Labour MP. He protests that the hunting cause is made up of 'the privileged minority which for centuries ran this country from the manor houses of rural England' and tried to keep people like him 'in our place'...He accuses hunt campaigners of staging 'the last hurrah of the feudal system' and trying to preserve 'the age-old privileges of land ownership', a fight which he condemns as futile.  'Labour governments have come and gone and left little impression on the gentry. But a ban on hunting touches them. It threatens their inalienable right to do as they please on their own land. For the first time, a decision of a Parliament they don't control has breached their wrought-iron gates.

Yes - this is about class war - Telegraph - Peter Bradley, the MP who proposed the amendment to delay the Hunting Bill until 2006, says the battle is a last hurrah for the feudal system.  Now that hunting has been banned, we ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over the Bill was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom, it was class war.

It was the PM, not the Lords, that the Commons defeated - Matthew d'Ancona - Telegraph - Blair craved a compromise on hunting but last week his own tribe said: enough. 

Death to the enemies of Blair, but the foxes must be spared - Geoffrey Wheatcroft - Telegraph - The ban on hunting demonstrates the sheer rottenness of our political culture - Hunting is a question on which MPs can parade their consciences, but with absolutely no political risk. Barely 250,000 people hunt; four million people fish. If the figures were the other way round, the politics would be too: if four million people hunted, then we would have been told that New Labour was the fox-hunter's friend.

There is no parliamentary seat in the country, not even in Leicestershire or Gloucestershire, where a "hunting vote" is decisive, but there must be 5,000 to 10,000 anglers in every constituency, so that any MPs who had the honesty and courage to say that they wanted to ban fishing as well as hunting would be in real danger of losing their seats. And then they would no longer be able to get their hands on their inflated salaries, their corrupt expenses, and the opportunity to bully other people.

Police fear hunting ban strain - Rosie Cowan - The Guardian - Police could be stretched to the limit dealing with widespread public disorder following the hunting ban, the leading representative for rank and file officers warned yesterday. Jan Berry, who chairs the Police Federation in England and Wales, admitted that vociferous opposition to the new law would put huge strain on the resources of small rural forces and create problems for officers on the ground... it could be hard to get enough officers to a trouble scene quickly, particularly given the expected wide-ranging nature of the pro-hunt campaign. "This has potential for large scale civil disorder, which could be extremely costly, and officers will have to be diverted from other duties," she said.  

'Martyrs' ready for prison as activists plot tactics - Radical groups plan unlawful disruption - Steven Morris - The Guardian - In a cosy pub close to the Shropshire-Worcestershire border over a fortifying drink and supper, the three-strong steering group which coordinates the work of the Countryside Action Network will meet next week to finalise its plans for rebellion and disruption.  At a "flick of a switch", the group claims, it can mobilise hundreds, even thousands of activists ready to make their views against the hunting ban known, perhaps by bombarding the government with phone calls, possibly by bringing motorways to a standstill. More radical elements favour a blockade of local airports, while the cautious say they will make their point by simply carrying on hunting, knowing that the police will have an almost impossible job finding them in the 100 square miles of mountainous terrain where they hunt.

In pursuit of civil disobedience - BBC - Hunt supporters have promised a multi-pronged campaign of civil disobedience and disruption in protest at the government's outlawing of hunting with dogs.