The Alliance’s board meeting on Tuesday was headlined by a visit from Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of leading civil liberties and human rights group Liberty. In outlining the challenges that faced her organisation it soon became clear that we share common ground on civil liberties and human rights.

Shami described some of the difficulties of the ‘left wing’ label that has always been associated with her organisation and compared these to the ‘conservative’ tag that we so often have to bear. Her main point was that civil liberties and human rights should not be seen as either ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’ as Dominic Lawson argued in his Independent article on the Conservatives and Human Rights (quoting our own case) last month. Human Rights are just as relevant for hunters as they are for other minorities.

Those of you who attended the Alliance’s AGM that same day (see below for a list of the annual awards) heard me reinforce the message that the organisation must have ‘impeccable rural credentials’ if it is be an effective advocate of each of our issues. Perhaps I should have gone further and added that, individually, we must also have impeccable political credentials and be consistent in our arguments. If we criticise the Government for riding roughshod over our rights and liberties we should not remain silent when it does the same to others.

You can find out more about Liberty and its work at
 http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/