AGM 2025: The League Against Cruel Sports Narrowly Avoids Contact With Its Own Members (Again)

In 1925, the League welcomed its opponents to speak. In 2025, it can barely cope with questions from its own members. A century on, the AGM reveals a charity shrinking in ambition, attendance — and honesty.

On 25 November 1925, the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports held its inaugural meeting at Church House, Westminster. A proper meeting. In a real building. With real people.

And, crucially, with opponents present — a gang of rowdy young pro-hunt supporters who spent much of the evening heckling, jeering, and hurling interruptions at the speakers.

Sir George Greenwood, the League’s formidable first chairman, did not mute them. He didn’t disable their chat function. He didn’t request their questions days in advance to check for “appropriateness.”

Instead, he offered them the floor. He told them they would have their say later in the evening. The interruptions continued anyway — including during the speech by Miss Lind-af-Hageby — but the point remains: the 1925 League allowed its loudest critics to speak.

Fast-forward one hundred years and — well — here we are. Church House has been replaced by Zoom. Hecklers have been replaced by silence. And the League has moved from welcoming open debate to treating its own members as a potential security threat.

The movement that once filled a Westminster hall now struggles to fill a gallery view of 31 grey rectangles, half of them staff who were probably required to attend.

Yes, the League Against Cruel Sports’ 2025 AGM took place once again on Zoom, completing the charity’s transformation into a moribund, member-repellent administrative blob.

A charity supposedly boasting tens of thousands of supporters has now been reduced to the digital equivalent of a parish council meeting held in the back room of a derelict pub. Thirty-one people logged in.

Remove the staff, the trustees, and the person who clicked the link thinking it was their Pilates class, and the number of actual members willing to witness the spectacle hovers around twenty.

Wildlife Betrayed streamed the whole thing on Twitch, naturally.

Luffingham Ascendant: Master of Ceremonies, Legend in His Own Lunch Break

The AGM opened with Chris Luffingham “facilitating,” a word which here means “performing an exaggerated impression of a leader while trying not to think about the job he didn’t get.”

Because yes — Chris is back in his role as Deputy CEO, having lost out (spectacularly) to Emma Slawinski for the top job. A defeat that would humble a normal person. But not Chris.

He approached the AGM like a man who had simply mislaid his chief executive crown and was certain someone would return it to him any minute.

He presided over the Zoom call as though unveiling a peace treaty at the UN, rather than chairing the disastrously shrunken AGM of a charity drifting into irrelevance.

To say he lorded it up would be an understatement. He practically hovered, buoyed by his own gaseous self-regard.

One half expected him to open proceedings with: “My fellow world leaders, as we gather here today in this Zoom breakout room…”

Naturally, there was no mention of last year’s cancelled “centenary celebration” — itself based on the League mistaking 1924 for 1925. No reference to the promised rescheduled event that never materialised.

And naturally no mention that the man now holding court on leadership once demonstrated his abilities by prompting over 25% of staff to leave. Everyone has their gift; his just happens to be workforce evacuation.

But self-awareness has never been Chris’s department. That position remains unfilled.

Saint Astrid of the Perpetual Reappointment

Then came the inevitable re-election of Astrid Clifford — voted back by everyone except one lonely dissenter, who may now require witness protection.

This was “democracy” in the same sense that North Korea holds “elections.”
Anything short of unanimous adoration is treated as a clerical error.

No mention of Clifford’s toxic digital record, her mocking tweets, her religiously tinged dog-whistles, or the fact that any responsible charity would have quietly ushered her to the exit years ago.

Instead, Astrid floated serenely across the screen like a benevolent matriarch guiding the League into its next glorious era of dwindling membership and spiralling incompetence.

The three new trustees were duly “ratified,” which in Zoom-speak means someone clicked an emoji at the wrong moment.

Emma Slawinski: Still the Only Adult in the Room

Through it all, Emma Slawinski did what Emma does: quietly, competently, and with patience, mop up the ideological porridge splattered across the walls by her colleagues.

She read out the pre-submitted questions — members were allowed one each, and only if emailed days in advance. The aim, clearly, was to intercept anything that risked truths escaping into the open.

Someone had the audacity to ask about political interference and the Andy Knott fiasco.
Emma did not defend it. She simply said she didn’t agree interference had occurred — a line so obviously imposed by circumstance that her internal monologue could be heard scraping under the surface.

One could only feel sorry for her: steering the listing ship while Clifford, Brown and Luffingham gleefully drill extra holes in the hull.

The Elephant in the Zoom: Dan Norris (Unmentioned, Unmentionable)

Six months on from Dan Norris’s dramatic resignation — the biggest scandal in the League’s history — not one syllable was uttered.

No explanation.
No apology.
Not even a vague mumble acknowledging that Clifford, Brown and Luffingham had orchestrated his reappointment the previous year.

Dan Norris has now been erased from League history with such enthusiasm that Stalin himself might have suggested they tone it down.

Sixty Minutes of Bland

The AGM limped to a close in under an hour.

Nothing said.
Nothing learned.
Nothing addressed.
Nothing explained.

In 2018, when the League could still persuade people to attend meetings in person, eighty members turned up. In 2025, barely thirty click a link.

If the League wishes to project confidence, this is not the way to do it. If it wishes to project farce, however, it is performing magnificently.

Conclusion: From Westminster Halls to Digital Ghost Town

The League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports began its life in a room filled with determination, democratic spirit, and — astonishingly — a willingness to let its opponents speak.

One hundred years later, the League marks its anniversary not at Church House, Westminster, but in a glitchy corner of Zoom, with a turnout so poor it could be comfortably seated inside a broom cupboard at the original venue.

Clifford clings on as if tethered by industrial cable.
Luffingham struts like a man convinced leadership is a performance art — the more pompous, the better.
Emma Slawinski remains the single competent adult forced to keep the lights on.
And the members?
A dwindling handful, muted, corralled, controlled, and increasingly disillusioned.

A century after its courageous founding, the League now feels less like a movement and more like a digital séance. Except even the ghosts seem to have stopped turning up.