Speaking at the Biodiversity, Wildlife Management & Cultural Heritage Conference in London, David Jones, chair of the Reform UK campaign for the 2026 Welsh Senedd elections, announced that, “if this Labour Government bans trail hunting – an activity in which no animal is pursued – the next Reform Government will reverse that ban.”
Labour’s 2024 general election manifesto commits the party to banning trail hunting in which dogs and riders follow a pre-laid scent.
Mr Jones, who defected to Reform from the Conservatives, said such a step would be tantamount to an act of “cultural warfare” amounting to denying the freedom of rural communities by those who don’t want to understand rural life.
The former Welsh Secretary labelled it as an act of “vindictiveness” that “deserves to be overturned”.
Speaking at a conference organised by the campaign group Hunting Kind, Mr Jones said that field sports are “a cornerstone of conservation” and managing landscapes ensures the preservation of habitats.
He praised the work of gamekeepers, calling them “among the best conservationists in Britain” and asked why “unfounded prejudice” is preferred to the hard evidence that controlled management of deer, pheasant and grouse populations preserves balance and biodiversity.
Drawing on his knowledge of Wales’s political landscape, Mr Jones warned that Labour’s devolved administration will “strangle rural enterprise in red tape” through its expansion of “bureaucratic control” over rural activities like shooting and the release of gamebirds.
He accused Labour of being an urban party that does not understand the countryside and how, “too often, it’s actively hostile too it”. It is a party captured by the mindset that “sneers and snipes at a way of life that these people don’t understand and want to destroy”.
He said that Labour cannot tolerate the “quiet dignity” of those who care for the British landscape out of “love and duty and because that is what they have always done”.
Labour was “pursuing a full-scale assault on the livelihoods of rural communities” through its planned changes to inheritance tax which will devastate family farms. An act of “vandalism” that will “shatter the continuity that sustains rural Britain”.
In contrast, he promised that Reform would stand by farmers and the rural community, a place where “the very soul of Britain still resides”, and that the party would do everything in its power to keep the countryside alive.
Hunting Kind’s Westminster conference went on to look at other ways of dealing with attacks on countrysports by the Keir Starmer’s government.
One message of hope at the conference came out of the great news that the UK is to adopt the United Nations – UNESCO – idea of preserving what it calls ‘intangible cultural heritage’.
Watch the whole conference here
Dr Nick Fox's slides
