Just like his position on Brexit, Jeremy Hunt’s ever-changing stance on fox hunting is not to be trusted

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Thursday 04 July 2019 15:07 BST
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Jeremy Hunt U-turns on ending fox hunting ban

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I was interested to read that Jeremy Hunt has changed his mind within hours of announcing his pledge to bring back fox hunting if he becomes our next prime minister.

“It is part of our countryside”, he first explained. Is this not utter hypocrisy versus his stance on not offering a second referendum on leaving the EU, due to it being deemed undemocratic to hold a second vote on something already “decided”?

The worst thing about this is that I’m guessing there were more stats available on the number of fox deaths prior to the law being passed, versus the complete vagueness surrounding the Brexit vote.

It would be quite funny if it wasn’t so depressing. But it’s not surprising, given there are many who still want a hard Brexit now that the impact is more understood.

Marc Cutworth
Cambridgeshire

Jeremy Hunt just declared he is in favour of fox hunting, even if he won’t “seek to change” the law as prime minister. Someone who considers himself fit to be prime minister supports a practice which sets a pack of hounds onto a fox until it is so exhausted it can be overcome and torn to pieces while the human participants look on. A “sport” that sees foxes dug out of underground refuges while they are simultaneously savaged by the hunter’s terriers.

Theresa May declared her support for the same barbaric savagery during the last general election, and promptly lost a vast number of votes, as she well deserved.

The cruelty and stupidity of the Tories is beyond belief.

Penny Little
Great Haseley

Plenty of evidence, Boris

Boris Johnson is looking forward to changing politics after 31 October so that policy decisions are based on clear evidence (Boris Johnson vows to freeze ‘sin taxes’ and launch review into whether they work).

Why wait till then? He could start immediately by reviewing his Brexit policy to “leave, come what may” against all of the evidence available.

He might then be able to explain to us all on what evidence he believes it is in the best interests of the UK as a whole and of all of its constituent parts to leave the EU. I know that it isn’t, but I am open to hearing other views.

Charles Wood
Birmingham

Kenya Airways and drastic measures

The horrific death of the man who fell from a Kenya Airways plane depicts the miseries, injustices and human rights violations people go through in much of our world today.

I really hope that dictators would feel a sense of guilt for causing people to take such drastic and dangerous measures in search for a better life, something they have missed in their own countries.

These egotistical, greedy leaders should feel ashamed of themselves for driving people to lose their sanity and take up measures that put their lives into great danger.

But I doubt if anything would cause these leaders to shed tears and feel a sense of responsibility.

Abubakar N Kasim
Toronto

Independent Minds Events: get involved in the news agenda

The scourge of tobacco

I’ve been following and fighting tobacco since my 1984-88 Alabama mayoral term.

Regretfully, I must be the only one questioning the commentators of the first presidential Democratic debate with their “nicotine-stain-coloured-tobacco-silence”, as they avoided addressing the slaughtering of 480k Americans annually without a debate question.

How many must die to stop marginalising tobacco as it preys on our marginal? Tobacco wasn’t racist yesterday, today, or never will discriminate. Tobacco, not climate change or guns, rendered me fatherless at age 11 in 1964.

Mike Sawyer
Denver

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