Ladies and Gentlemen,

As an American, I found that people of all classes and backgrounds could listen to what I had to say with an open mind, uncluttered by class or national stereotype, Also, as an American, particularly one who became politically aware in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, I had witnessed the rise of pressure group politics in the United States. I could therefore describe, in words which others could accept as unbiased, the transformation of traditional, principle-based politics to the current style of media and opinion poll driven politics which is so successfully exploited by single issue pressure groups like those that make up the animal rights and anti-gun lobbies. I had. after all, seen with my own eyes how the combination of media and pressure group politics had reversed US domestic and foreign policy and destroyed of the career of President Johnson, perhaps the most powerful politician of his generation.

This transformation in politics, from principled, national compromise and tolerance, to that of the focus group, public relations, opinion polls and knee-jerk legislation and regulation, is now well under way in Europe. There is in this respect no difference, in my view, between President Clinton, Prime Minister Blair, or Herr Schroeder - but many people, particularly people leading traditional lives in the British countryside, found it hard to understand the profound implications for them of this change. They had an inchoate sense that things had turned against them but little idea of how or why.

After all it is to experience a pre-modern way of life that is one of the principal reasons people like me go to and enjoy the countryside. It provides an escape from the many superficialities of modem urban life and provides an opportunity to experience, even if only for a limited time, a sense of tradition, courtesy, generosity and community, as well as one's feelings towards nature and the landscape. I often think it is the loss of such qualities in most people’s lives that provokes envy of those who still enjoy them. Traditional people and ways of life are, in this sense, to be treasured, but it also means that like threatened tribes in the rain forest, the southern deserts, or the far North, that they are the least prepared to deal with the pressures of modern politics.

My urban, television-based upbringing and adult life therefore also gave me the right background to describe a way of life quite alien to many of my audiences. I understand that most people who live in cities and suburbs only know about animals from television, films or their household pets and that they simply deny - and are assisted every day in this denial by supermarkets and fast food restaurants - that the food they eat comes from animals that once walked, swam or flew on the earth. For the majority of the population food comes in packages in which every trace of its origin, feathers, fur, scales, organs, even the bones themselves, have been removed. Children today think that milk comes from cartons and is made in factories like Coca-Cola and that animals have human personalities like those in Walt Disney cartoons and modern children's books.

The connection between modern man and the natural cycle of life and death is virtually severed. We no longer think of ourselves as the most successful predator or top of the food chain or as animals like those we eat. We even shut away the reality of the death of our relations and friends which now almost invariably takes place behind closed doors in hospitals and mortuaries. For such people the idea that sportsmen shoot or hunt animals for fun is unacceptable, barbaric and cruel. Indeed, for people raised on a continuous diet of television and film violence, anyone who owns guns must be a Rambo, a gangster, a serial killer, mentally deficient and emotionally inadequate; a threatening member of the "gun culture". That the overwhelming majority of sportsmen and women who hunt, shoot and fish are decent, law-abiding people, who care deeply for animals, the environment and for the safety of their community makes no difference; indeed, and this is sometimes the hardest thing to understand, the facts make very little difference to the debate.

The hysterical claims, bogus statistics, fraudulent photographs, that dominate the debate are a manifestation of the dominance of feelings over thought, of hatred of others over tolerance of those with whom we disagree. The still, small voice of reason often seems and often is, drowned out - just ask the pistol shooters in Britain, whose sport was summarily banned despite, indeed even before, publication of a carefully considered report by an impartial High Court judge, which demonstrated that responsible and safe pistol ownership was achievable and in some respects desirable. The facts, reasoned debate, the things which you and I grew up to understand as the essence of democratic politics, are simply swept aside as irrelevant. That such emotion-driven politics has been the source, throughout the 20th century, of totalitarian regimes is ignored.

This brings me to my third strength in presenting the case. I know what it means to be in a minority, a member of a community which has been victimised over and over again by those swept up in the heat of their feelings. In politics sentimentality can be as dangerous as hatred as it more easily justifies behaviour which is in fact a form of persecution. It has not been lost on historians that the Hitler Youth were very sentimental about nature and animals and that Hitler was the first modern politician to ban fox hunting. There always seems to be something inherently oppressive, an undercurrent of latent violence about a sentimental crowd; mass hysteria is just around the corner. Anyone who has had to face screaming hunt saboteurs in balaclavas will understand what I mean.

Therefore, I could recognise that country people, sportsmen and women were themselves a minority group, under pressure from prejudiced, often hysterical, people. It came as a shock to many to realise that they had something significant in common with racial and religious minorities, gay people and feminists. That they too had to learn to defend themselves just like other minorities of which the majority in society disapproved. These techniques - public demonstrations, advertising, public relations campaigns, political lobbying - are now well established. but they require effective organisation, professional advice and substantial sums of money, measured in the millions of dollars.

Yet, everywhere I went in Britain and Europe I found apathy, complacency, defeatism and, worst of all, a conviction in each group that it had nothing in common with others. I was told, ''You don't understand, things are different here'', 'We don't have your British class problems", ''Here shooting / hunting is the sport of the common man", "The animal rights groups could not be effective here''. And everywhere I looked there were dozens, sometimes hundreds, of small membership organisations, fragmented in approach, narrow in focus, poorly funded and badly led. And everywhere, too, there was a measure of despair and sense of hopelessness; an almost Marxist sense of the inevitable collapse of a way of life "We can't defend what we do'', ''I've seen the best of it", "The organisation is useless", "It's just a waste of money''. Everywhere I was told things were different and yet everywhere they were the same. The threat, of course, is global. The organisations opposed to us are extraordinarily well funded, professionally managed and advised, politically astute, and with dedicated (and well-compensated) activists and personnel. The three main animal rights organisations in the UK, for example, have over £100 million in assets, an annual income of £30 million. They spent some £5 million on advertising alone in support of the most recent attempt to ban fox hunting and that followed a £1 million donation to the Labour Party before the election. They have successfully infiltrated and pressurised leading charities, such as the RSPCA and National Trust, as well as the local constituency organisations of hundreds of politicians.

The solution, of course, is also common the world over. The political will must be found to unify the defence of all fieldsports and related interests under one roof, as we have done in The Countryside Alliance. Old attitudes, such as that "shooting people have nothing in common with people who hunt with hounds'' ''There are too many fishermen to ever be threatened politically'' must be overcome once and for all. For anyone who doubts the the need for this, I ask them to examine Holland. In that unfortunate country, those that hunted with hounds fought alone and their sport was banned. Next in line were those who shoot game. They, too, fought alone and are now limited to three quarry species and no one believes that even this will survive for more than a couple more years. Now it is the turn of the angler. To their shock, the cruelty and 'green" arguments are deployed more and more successfully against them; and, of course, there are no other sportsmen left to help them.

Those that oppose us, the "antis", have a clear agenda and their techniques improve all the time. For them it is both an industry (and a good employer) and a religion, a substitute for many for the now discredited socialism in which they believed. Without this "cause" many of their lives would be meaningless, so they must continue. We must recognise that they have been successfully manipulating the general public - which does have legitimate concerns of public health and safety and the quality of the environment - through effective propaganda and years of effort in creating negative stereotypes. We must also accept that our opponents are capable of doing enormous damage in a very short time, long before the next election. Anyone who watched one of the most powerful industrial organisations in the world, Shell Oil, humbled in a matter of days under the pressure of a Greenpeace-directed campaign against disposal of the Brent Spar oil rig, will know what I mean. The results of years of careful scientific analysis were cast aside in the face of a carefully designed and dishonest media campaign. To this day no-one knows what to do with a rig which clearly should have been sunk in the deep Atlantic. As an even worse consequence in the aftermath of the storm, the British government went even further to require the removal of all such rigs even though it is in the fishing exclusion zones around them that are to be found the only healthy stocks of fish in the North Sea.

The facts, the long-term implications, mean nothing when the media circus begins to roll and the politicians leap to get ahead of the curve of public- opinion and "do something" regardless of the consequences. It is in this way that fundamental freedoms are lost, the countryside and its wildlife suffer and the traditions of sportsmanship, care for the environment and for each other that have taken centuries to evolve are damaged if not destroyed. The clear lesson to us is that we must fight fire with fire and assume that the war will be a long and continuous one. We must stop squabbling among one another we must reach out to our natural allies; we must establish responsible self-regulatory bodies and codes of conduct; we must create unified, well-funded, professionally managed and advised campaigning organisations which can successfully use all the modern techniques of political lobbying and the media, and which can mobilise people from across the spectrum of our societies.

If the July Rally in Hyde Park and the recent march in London have taught us anything, it is that we must demonstrate the intensity of our feelings. not just make the arguments, important though that is. It is clear to me that you are already embarked on the necessary work of statistical and scientific research, but to succeed you must go beyond that - you must deal with the underlying causes of the attack or our way of life. We must destroy the carefully created and manipulated stereotypes by showing who we are: not violent, blood-thirsty, greedy or arrogant, bur peaceful, decent law-abiding, thoughtful people of all types and backgrounds, who are determined to protect their rights to make their own moral decisions and to be left alone to live in their own way. We must also demonstrate the benefits - economic, environmental and national - of what we do for society as a whole.

In the end that is what this war is all about - the right of every responsible sportsman or woman of every segment of our community to be left in peace to live as he or she chooses in a tolerant and pluralistic society and not to be dictated to by others. We must recognise and activate the two fundamental themes which can bind us all together: freedom and community. These are also the themes with which the vast majority of our fellow citizens can also sympathise. Everyone is, after all, a member of some minority group whether defined by their background, their beliefs or their behaviour and if any group which is not infringing the rights of others is suppressed the quality of all our lives suffers. In other words the fundamental issues are those of our human and civil rights.

If you each in your own country and across its borders. can give a voice, as we have recently done in Britain, to the often inarticulate anger felt by all those whose lives are being diminished by thoughtlessness and fanaticism, who are sick and tired of interference with their lives, you will find many unexpected friends who will fight with you. If you can reach out not only to other sportsmen but to the broader community of which we are all a part, you can and will win these battles. I can then look forward to joining you in years to come to hear of your success in protecting our heritage.