Chapotraphouse

Meeting Simon Russell, the chair of The Hunt Saboteurs Association (hunt sabs) for the first time, was a proper laugh. Simon is a veteran activist and for over 40 years has been on the front lines fighting the UK’s cruel hunting lobby. His fight isn’t just for animal lives, it’s against the law, the police and entrenched class privilege. These are a few snippets from Simon’s life, stories of blood, bias and a new strategy to save animal lives.

Hunt sabs — the awakening

Simon’s fight started in the 1970s before he was even legally an adult. His father was a trade unionist, so he was already left-leaning but it was the visceral images of seal clubbing that really radicalised him. After attending his first protest in Trafalgar Square and the rest is history as his focus quickly turned to animal rights in the UK.

At age 17, Simon was arrested for the first time. Outside of a London McDonald’s he was handing out ‘McLibel’ leaflets when a copper shot him a warning. ‘Block that fucking door and you’re nicked’ was the message. Simon handed a leaflet to a passer-by and was immediately arrested and held until 2am.

It was this moment that changed his life. He had seen the police act with aggression and bias. He quickly realised:

If we couldn’t leaflet, what could we do?

This aggression pushed him towards more direct action. I mean, if you’re going to get arrested for leafletting, might as well get arrested for something a little more fun, right? So Simon joined the Tunbridge Wells sab group and his passion was born.

The Hunt Sabs Association began in 1963 when other animal rights groups had stopped using direct action and to this day the HSA is still the longest-surviving direct action group in the UK. The Aggravated Trespass Law was even created partially because of their antics in the countryside.

Blood, bone and institutional bias

The fight against the hunt is physical, and more often than not, aggressive. Simon laughed when he told me that he had been hospitalised seven times, brushing off concussion as nothing at all. He even laughed when he talked about getting jumped by six hunters who left him with a broken knee. It didn’t fucking stop him going out sabbing though.

Neither did the time he was assaulted with a knife and suffered a deep wound and a severed nerve, going on to speak about the absolute disdain coppers showed him when they turned up. They turned the ambulance away, demanding Simon made the choice between making a statement and getting much needed medical attention. Joke was on them though, before whisking himself away Simon made his statement and covered the paper in blood. And yet not a single charge was brought against the knife-wielding attacker, despite the hunt sabs offering police all the proof they needed. And let’s not even mention the time the hunt tried to drown him…

Simon assured me that this bias is common, although it has lessened in recent years, yet the distrust of the police will always permeate the movement.

I have never been through a court case where a copper hasn’t lied.

The psychological toll on sabs is massive. Confronting the hunt is fucking scary — they’re big, they have crops and guns — and they don’t give a shit about peasants. Being out in public, in the country, can leave sabs worried.

Then there’s times when sabs have paid the ultimate price for their activism. A young man named Tom was killed when he was hit by a speeding horse-box on a country lane. Another named Mike lost his life when he fell out of one of the hunt’s flatbed trailers.

Sabbing takes serious steel.

Class war and the countryside

The fight to save animal lives is deeply rooted in classist ideology. It’s not the working class who are roaming the countryside on thoroughbred horses and wearing fucking ridiculous coats. It’s not us who need to take an innocent, scared life to satisfy some disgusting bloodlust. These hunters tend to be wealthy and privileged, and they look down their noses on the sabs. Frequently activists are called ‘peasants’ and ‘scum,’ whilst high-profile, elitist establishment shit-holes such as Eton still boast their own beagle packs.

Simon said that even the legal system reflects this bias. Although it’s rare a sab is imprisoned, they do frequently incur legal costs and these can be fucking unfathomable. The hunters come from affluent families who can cover them easily. Sabs, on the other hand, can lose absolutely everything financially to fight for their freedom.

Police bias can be blatant. Some coppers policing the countryside have even admitted to being part of the hunt themselves. A brave few have even told Simon:

I don’t [like] protesters, they deserve what they get.

Pricks. That statement explains why so many police have ignored violence against sabs and countless incidents where their vehicles have been attacked with projectiles and chains.

A pivot to parliament

Simon has now moved the fight from the field to the Houses of Parliament. Despite the lack of trust in the police and the system, he recognises that not everything can be changed with direct action.

When Labour got in, Simon saw his chance and helped to push the hunting ban into their manifesto. He knew it would be safe to pass the House of Lords if he got it in there. Now building good relationships with MP’s, with the HSA holding a well-attended event in parliament to educate politicians and to push them to choose for institutional changes. Educating MP’s and, of course, giving them little freebies to tempt them through the doors appears to have had a massive impact.

Simon now has a core group of politicians and police figures who are happy to support the HSA’s demands to end the hunt. As testimony to his hard work and very frequent trips to London to push for change, Simon has now been invited to be an active participant at the round table discussion to help shape this new legislation.

But time is running out. If earthworm-human hybrid Nigel Farage seizes power in the next government, the ban could be reversed. He’s always been a vocal supporter of blood sports.

The HSA’s top priority is saving lives and Simon knows that building a rapport with the police will help the organisation to achieve this faster. Nothing, he stated, is more important than that.

They’re never going to stop. They’re legally savvy, but there’s always a risk — now after the ban on Palestine Action — of the HSA becoming branded a proscribed organisation.

But as Simon puts it:

Even if they did shut us down, we’d just open back up under another name!

The Hunt sabs association needs your support still

This decades long fight has taken its toll. It’s cost lives, it’s cost people’s peace of mind and countless vehicle costs.

Simon Russel and the HSA need our help more than ever to fight back against this class-based cruelty and these pompous pricks on horseback. So here’s a few ways you can help:

• Join: Want to save lives? Why not join your local group on the ground. If you can’t do that, you can help out in with admin.
• Donate: You can support the HSA by becoming a one off, monthly or yearly supporter to help cover costs for groups.
• Share the HSA’s story: Keep up the pressure on parliament and share the facts about illegal hunting in the UK.
• Contact your MP: Yes, I know it’s fucking pointless, but no harm in applying local pressure.
• Educate yourself: Download the HSA’s booklet ‘Witness the end of hunting’ here and educate yourself legally.

Thanks for reading, and next time we hope to be on the ground with the hunt sabs to see how they’re confronting the hunt head-to-head.

A Prairie alliance of trans advocates and unions should be a national model Right-wing premiers are using the notwithstanding clause to target trans kids, workers, Muslims, and drug users. Saskatchewan shows how a united front could stop them

by Saima Desai

Dec 5 2025

In the summer of 2023, as Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe introduced a bill requiring teachers to inform parents when their children under 16 changed names or pronouns, he was met by an unlikely counter-blast.

“Outing children as part of a political gamble is violent and despicable,” tweeted the president of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour (SFL), which represents 100,000 unionized workers in the province.

The post went viral, at least by Prairie standards, with hundreds of retweets.

The province’s LGBTQ2S+ organizations, it turned out, had an unexpected ally: Saskatchewan’s labour movement.

Since that initial tweet salvo, labour organizations have played a big role in the growing opposition to Moe’s policy, which also lets parents pull their kids from sex ed classes in schools and bars schools from bringing in organizations to provide education on sex or gender.

In the fall of 2023, the day Premier Moe prepared to invoke the notwithstanding clause to shield the bill from court challenges, a rally of over 1,000 people gathered outside the provincial legislature. Organized by the SFL and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the crowd was full of flags emblazoned with the logos of the province’s unions.

Labour leaders from across the country flew in for the rally, including the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, the Ontario Federation of Labour, and the Canadian Labour Congress.

Unions saw that Saskatchewan’s trans kids needed their support, but they also recognized something else: Moe’s use of the notwithstanding clause to shield his widening offensive was something that tied them together.

“We could see very clearly in Saskatchewan that it was kids today that the Sask Party government was attacking, and it would be workers tomorrow,” Kent Peterson, president of CUPE Saskatchewan who attended the rally that day, told The Breach.

And ramping up is exactly what right-wing governments across Canada have been doing, using the notwithstanding clause as they target not just trans kids, but public sector workers, Muslims, and people who use drugs.

The clause, which allows governments to pass laws that override Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is being abused in new ways seemingly every month. But because the clause overrules Charter challenges, there are few tools that can stop them—except perhaps, the power of public mobilization.

That understanding underlies the alliance that has been growing between unions and trans advocates in this prairie province. As governments everywhere invoke the clause to lash out at vulnerable groups, it’s a model of solidarity that should be replicated across the country. Protestors rally in front of the Saskatchewan legislation in 2023 over Scott Moe’s use of the notwithstanding clause. A loophole once used rarely to bypass the Charter, the notwithstanding clause is becoming a favourite blunt instrument of right-wing governments. Credit: X/@bctf Taking the fight from the streets to the courts

UR Pride, a Regina-based queer and trans community organization, first issued a court challenge against Moe’s legislation, Bill 137, arguing it violates children’s Charter rights. But after a judge granted an injunction to halt the policy, the Saskatchewan government invoked the notwithstanding clause to force it into law.

Now the law is being challenged before the Supreme Court of Canada, thwarting the government’s earlier efforts to get the case thrown out. UR Pride is arguing that the law violates a different section of the Charter—the right to be free from cruel and unusual treatment—that the government of Saskatchewan didn’t cite when it invoked the notwithstanding clause.

CUPE Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, and the Canadian Teachers’ Federation jointly applied to intervene in the court case. They’re adding their own argument that the pronoun policy would infringe on the teachers’ and education workers’ “professional obligations to place their students’ interests first.”

In addition to court challenges, it means unions have to be prepared to defend teachers and education workers who refuse to enforce transphobic policies.

“There are 7,000 to 8,000 CUPE members in the education system in this province who are now legally required to out trans and non-binary children, even if they think outing them will be harmful and violent to that kid,” said Peterson, the CUPE Sask President.

As far as Peterson knows, no CUPE-unionized education worker has been disciplined for defying Bill 137. But he says CUPE will protect its members who do, “through things like political action, campaigns, communication and, more directly, legal action.” The Sask Party successfully sold Bill 137 as a measure to “protect parents’ rights” to determine their child’s gender. “A lot of people bought that argument,” said Lori Johb, president of the SFL.

So undoing that narrative, in order to get union members on side, will be another area of work.

When they caught wind that the SFL was organizing a rally against Bill 137, “we did have a push-back internally,” said Johb. “So we had to do a lot of educating around that.”

Unions are some of the only groups that have successfully beat back right-wing uses of the notwithstanding clause—like in 2022, when Ford backed down from using the clause to bar a CUPE strike after education workers almost brought the province to a general strike.

In Saskatchewan, the labour movement has notched some initial victories. In 2007 and 2008, Moe’s predecessor Brad Wall passed a bill that would have prohibited some public sector employees like health care workers from striking. The SFL took the law to the Supreme Court and won a historic victory for the labour movement: the court agreed that the right to strike is a fundamental freedom protected by the Charter.

Wall later threatened to use the notwithstanding clause to pass the law anyways, but he eventually backed down.

Now, as the clause is being used to target trans kids in Saskatchewan and Alberta, Johb said, “we have to fight to make sure that win means something.” Defeating the notwithstanding clause—politically

A loophole once used rarely to bypass the Charter, the notwithstanding clause is becoming a favourite blunt instrument of right-wing governments in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and now Alberta.

Premier Doug Ford used it for the first time ever in Ontario in 2018 to stop his critics—especially unions—from running election ads. He tried it again in 2022 to prohibit education workers from striking. And this year, he floated the idea of using it to override a judge’s injunction that halted his plan to rip up bike lanes.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has used the notwithstanding clause for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time in the province’s history—all in the last two months. In October, she invoked the clause in legislation ordering 51,000 striking teachers back to work. In November, she used it to protect three laws restricting trans youths’ access to health care, their ability to change their pronouns in school, and trans women’s participation in sports.

Canada’s right-wing governments seemingly discovered the notwithstanding clause all at the same time. But it’s no coincidence. They’re passing notes.

Reactionary provincial legislatures are acting in concert to normalize overriding the Charter to target their chosen punching bags. Just months apart in 2024, the B.C. Conservatives and the New Brunswick Conservatives both mused about using the notwithstanding clause to involuntarily detain drug users.

In Alberta, the United Conservative Party government recently filed arguments to support Quebec’s hijab ban—which passed into law only with the help of the notwithstanding clause—as it’s being challenged at the Supreme Court. In that argument, Smith called the clause a “hard-fought and hard-won compromise” that safeguards provincial sovereignty.

The response from some opponents of these laws has been to try and restrict or ban the use of the notwithstanding clause. But, as political scientist Dónal Gill argues, if the left takes seriously our commitment to democracy, that means allowing elected governments (even right-wing ones) to have authority over our rights, not vesting all decision-making power in unelected judges.

With efforts to ban the use of the notwithstanding clause, Gill writes, “advocates of progressive causes can find themselves grasping for legal solutions to political problems.”

So the left must once again outmaneuver the right on the terrain of politics. That means that, just as right-wing governments team up to demonize trans kids, public sector unions, religious minorities, and people who use drugs, the left must come together in an even more powerful coalition to stop them.

Saskatchewan shows a model for how this might be done. With three new abuses of the clause in Alberta last month, it’s time to take it national.