The New Dark Age

This is a guest post from West Midlands Hunts Saboteurs.

In 2023, Warwickshire Police served a Community Protection Notice (CPN) on the Warwickshire Hunt due to the number of antisocial behaviour issues that the hunt had been causing for years on public roads. The hunt appealed the notice, and a court date was set — but then what happened next was nothing short of a scandal.

Rather than a transparent legal process, the court case against Warwickshire Hunt suddenly vanished. Instead, a protocol was agreed in a secret meeting with senior Warwickshire Police officers, the police legal team and members of the Warwickshire Hunt. No minutes of this meeting exist.

All the public was told was that an agreement had been reached between both parties that was far wider-reaching than the original CPN but no one, not even officers within Warwickshire Police (save for a select few), was allowed to know its contents.

When we heard this news, a small group of us vowed to fight this decision. A campaign was started to ensure the protocol’s contents were made public, but it quickly became far wider than just the issue of antisocial behaviour and a CPN. The protocol raised so many other issues about transparency, truth, justice and the very concept and legitimacy of policing. Here was a police force acting in secret in the way it used its powers and in its relationship with an organisation that many, including many of its own officers, consider an organised crime group.

There was also the question of how a well-connected group has such power and influence with a police force and the legal system. If you have this kind of power, you can essentially buy your own laws and buy your way out of trouble.

We worked alongside local people striving to get to the truth and we all knew something really bad had happened, something really corrupt. We started by submitting Freedom of Information requests, but these were always denied. The police used the excuse that the protocol was covered by an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act for court records. Other requests were denied because they were “not in the public interest”.

Meanwhile, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Warwickshire, Philip Seccombe, who is supposedly responsible for holding Chief Constable Alex Franklin-Smith to account, is openly a member of the pro-bloodsports Countryside Alliance. He has refused to say publicly what questions he had asked her about the protocol when he met her and again, no minutes for this meeting exist. During another meeting with Warwickshire Police’s Rural Crime Team – the department that issued the CPN in the first place – Seccombe again failed to raise the issue of the secret protocol.

How can a police force claim to be transparent and open when it makes secret deals with groups of powerful people behind closed doors? How is this fair and how is this transparent?

For two years, people have attended local Police and Crime Panel meetings, doorstepped Seccombe and compiled logs of information showing incidents of illegality by the hunt stemming back many years. They have made numerous official complaints to police professional standards, the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the Information Commissioner’s Office. People power pushed this secret deal into the open.

Eventually, Channel 4 News became interested in the story. Locals had also complained to their MPs and one had raised questions in Parliament after he was also denied a copy of the protocol. He has called for a public enquiry into how this had been allowed to happen,

Finally, in January 2025, after two years of doubling down on their insistence that the secret protocol could never be made public, Warwickshire Police published it. The contents were shocking and proved everything we had been saying about how a fox hunt was protected by the state.

The protocol said Warwickshire Police had agreed to inform the Warwickshire Hunt at least one hour in advance if officers intended to show up on the day of a hunt. Why would anyone acting lawfully need that kind of advance notice? An hour allows plenty of time to ensure that when the police do arrive, any illegal activities have been covered up. Who else gets this kind of special treatment?

Warwickshire Police also agreed to allow the Warwickshire Hunt access to senior officers via monthly meetings with a Chief Inspector or more senior officer to discuss the hunting season. Who else gets this kind of special treatment?

Alarmingly, Warwickshire Police also agreed to share any credible complaints by members of the public to an email address supplied by the hunt. There is a good chance that anyone who complained about the Warwickshire Hunt whilst this secret deal was in place had their complaint emailed directly to the hunt, who would be able to identify them. However, the force has refused to even tell the public how many complaints were made about the hunt, insisting this risked identifying individuals and breaching their privacy.

The protocol also revealed that if Warwickshire Police considered it had ever been breached, the hunt was allowed 14 days to respond before senior police officers could then use their discretion to report the breach to the hunt’s own regulatory body, the British Hound Sports Association (BHSA). Previously called the Hunting Office, the BHSA was the organisation exposed, during leaked webinars, advising members on the best ways to circumvent the 2004 Hunting Act ban on fox hunting.

To understand just how pro-hunt the secret protocol is, you only have to look at the language in it. It talks about “hunting activities hundreds of years old and is a deep rooted British rural culture” but when referring to hunt saboteur groups, it labels them as aggressive, violent and threatening.

Language is important. The language used in this protocol shows that the hunt clearly had a big part in writing it.

When the protocol finally came out, people were quite rightly angered about how their police force had stitched up this sordid deal. They have no faith in the police or the judicial system.  Our next step is a public meeting demanding truth, transparency and justice for our local communities and wildlife.

We have shown that when a small group of determined people come together, they can take the state on and win.