BY NIGEL BEAN & PAUL READ

Finally, after two years of this publication alongside others highlighting the use of faked videos by animal rights extremists to promote their narrative and pervert the course of justice, we welcome the long-awaited conviction of a hunt saboteur.

With the conviction of David Graham of the West Midlands Hunt Sabs for handing over tampered evidence he hoped would fraudulently convict an innocent man, we ask the question who is ultimately responsible for this criminality?

The Home Office are in charge of the police and it was they who received numerous signed witness statements from desperate circus folk around 1998 explaining how they had been set up by animal rights cheats with faked videos. The Home Office did nothing while Labour were in charge, they put ideology over impartiality and their progressive standpoint was clearly anti-circus.

David Cameron was also informed when he was a Conservative MP, he later became Prime Minister but withered in the face of unrelenting fabrications and propaganda from animal rights cheats. When asked in Parliament about the plight of a tiger held in transit after suffering years of abuse at the hands of what was claimed was a cruel circus owner, he facilitated the transit rather than investigate. If he had bothered to check, he would have discovered Parliament had been duped. The tiger had been illegally removed from a loving animal trainer in a German circus and was a ruse to collect ever more donations from an unsuspecting public. The charity responsible has Chris Packham as their trustee – he was at the centre of raising donations from the public in similar fashion using tigers donated to an animal rehoming centre in Spain.

There have been repeated failures of duty to protect innocent members of the public by our politicians and civil servants, something which should be looked at now after Graham’s conviction. Just because the antis’ targets may seem to be engaging in business that the prevailing wind suggests is unfashionable does not mean that it is illegal – politicians and civil servants should be careful to protect all by the law.

The Press have behaved disgracefully too. The blame for so many past injustices where fakery has won the day, surely, lies squarely on their shoulders. They happily linked to fake videos and pushed the narrative of extremists. Not one apology has been heard since. They were happy to highlight alleged animal cruelty without investigation of the facts or checking whether they were being duped by antis and their charities. Should a mere four idiots turn up at a National Trust property with placards stating, “Ban Hunting”, it was reported on. By that arbiter they may as well have reported on overheard discussions in chip shop queues.

We discovered the West Midlands Hunt Saboteurs, of which David Graham was a member, enjoyed the ear of a prominent news group. Papers like the Coventry Telegraph would regularly trawl their Facebook site and, without proper investigation, replicate their propaganda word for word.

This story was taken directly off the West Midlands Facebook site without proper journalistic investigation. What is not investigated and reported is the Whipper-in was actually angry at the saboteur using a device to call hounds off the huntsman and onto a road subsequently finding out from the saboteur that his efforts to disrupt the hunt have not only put hounds lives at risk but put the hounds onto a fox – this was twisted to speculate that he is hunting illegally. The public are then misled by the paper into believing the Whipper-in is trying to get the camera because they don’t want to be filmed illegally hunting a fox when in fact he is actually trying to remove the device the antis are using to confuse the hounds.

The actual headline should have been – “Hunt Saboteur puts hounds’ lives in danger”.

This nonsense story then went up the journalistic food chain to the MSM. Lazy journalists at the main papers lapped up the fake news, the story making it onto the pages of The Sun and Daily Mail. Local news groups are notorious for their left-wing, anti-hunting narrative whereas the Sun and Mail are not – MSM journalistic laziness and buckling before the prevailing wind of townie anti-hunt sentiment encouraged the saboteurs as well as filling their coffers with donations.

And just how far were the papers willing to go to provoke the saboteurs and generate a story? We caught one journalist shamefully dropping stories into the Twitter time line of the West Mid Hunt Sabs looking to provoke a response, which of course he could then report on.

David Graham, a victim of the antis himself with his Asperger’s Syndrome, is a typical anti hunt patsy. Having found hunts act within the law, he tried to smear an innocent man to give the press the story they wanted. The real criminals, in our view, have got away scot-free and should be ashamed with themselves. As the rear-guard action against them gathers steam – and some seriously professional competence – one day others in their crooked groups will face justice too.