UNION FIGHTS LABOR'S HUNT BAN : PLANNED RESTRICTION IN BRITAIN ENDANGERS THEIR JOBS, LEADER SAYS.

Byline: Warren Hoge The New York Times

Advocates of fox hunting, feeling their traditional sport is endangered by the likelihood of a change in government after the national election May 1, have taken a step cunningly appropriate to fighting a party called Labor. They have formed a union.

``People have the impression this is a thing just for Lord and Lady Such and Such, but there are more than 90,000 of us employed in country sports, and Labor's threatening to take our livelihoods away,'' said John Fretwell, huntsman of the Stowe Beagles, who is the new group's chairman.

His number includes blacksmiths, gamekeepers, grooms, foresters, sports tailors, saddlers, feed merchants, river guardians called ghillies, and hunt assistants called stalkers, beaters and whippers-in.

None wears red jackets and black hats. Most are poorly paid, and many, like Fretwell, live in cottages or houses furnished by one of the 300 hunts around Britain. All are working-class folk, the kind of people who have looked to Labor to represent them in the past and whom Labor does not want to lose as it focuses on trying to win back power from the Conservative Party after 18 years in the political wilderness.

The lobby becomes millions if you add to their numbers the anglers who worry that restrictive government policy might move on to fishing and the hundreds of thousands of pensioners, farm workers and small-town professionals who consider that pulling on their Wellingtons, grabbing their walking sticks and ambling along with the hunt is the finest and most accessible form of recreation.

The object of their ire is a plank in the Labor Party platform that calls for a vote in the House of Commons to ban hunting with hounds. Until now it seemed a safe shot for Labor since the target was identified in party headquarters with high-horse upper-class elitism.

But the urban-oriented legions of the stylish New Labor party of the reformist leader Tony Blair did not reckon with the reaction it would rouse from Fretwell, surrounded by his frisky pack of taffy and white beagles whose boisterous baying is called by hunt lovers ``the music of the hounds,'' and from his many sympathizers in the countryside.

``Going along on a hunt is like people in New York watching a basketball game,'' he said. ``It's what people who live here do.''

Fretwell, a voluble Yorkshireman who is a walking emblem of British country life, with his patterned flat hat, riding crop and smock pockets full of biscuit bits for his cavorting dogs, thinks he has detected the scent of an all-out assault on rural life if the Labor Party, now far ahead in the polls, is not dissuaded from its plan to vote on the ban.

``The immediate target may be hunting, but it will only be a matter of time before the anti-field-sports campaigners move on to shooting and fishing,'' he said.

Elliot Morley, a former teachers' union head from Liverpool who is Labor's spokesman in Parliament on rural affairs, initially turned aside the concern expressed by the new Union of Country Sports Workers.

The party platform, however, was quickly rewritten the other day to play down the priority of the proposed move in Parliament.

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Photo

Photo: John Fretwell, in England with his beagles, heads a push against a proposed ban on hunts with dogs.

The New York Times