League members Expelled

The League’s Lost Backbone: How a £3.5 Million Windfall Became the Beginning of a Purge

In 2013, the League Against Cruel Sports received a transformative £3.5 million legacy from Stan Hales. For an organisation built on decades of volunteer grit and relentless activism, this financial boost should have turbo-charged the League’s fight against bloodsports. Instead, it has coincided with one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in the charity’s history — a period marked by questionable appointments, vanishing accountability, and the systematic expulsion of the very people who made the League effective in the first place.

From Campaigning Movement to Charity Machine

Until the passage of the Hunting Act, the League was not a charity at all — deliberately so. As a campaigning organisation, it needed the freedom to confront political power directly and push unapologetically for legislative change. Its purpose was simple: to fight cruelty wherever it was found and to challenge the institutions that enabled it.

This mission depended on its supporters and local groups across the country. They monitored hunts, gathered evidence, leafleted, fundraised, and stood up to powerful interests at their own financial cost and in their own free time. Much like today’s Hunt Saboteurs, they were a network of committed activists — not bystanders, not hobbyists, but the League’s engine room.

Becoming a charity changed everything. The League accepted the regulatory shackles that come with charitable status, particularly limits on political activity — a curious move for an organisation whose entire raison d’être is to change the law. With charitable status came a shift in culture: campaigning gradually gave way to fundraising, and fundraising gave way to paying the rising salaries of a new breed of senior managers whose passion was less about stopping cruelty and more about running a “sector-standard charity”.

The result has been a profound disconnect. Those who once defined the League’s effectiveness — hard-edged campaigners rooted in the cause — are now seen as troublesome relics. Anyone visibly passionate about opposing hunting or shooting is labelled an “extremist”, because the modern League’s staff and trustees often lack the same depth of commitment. Many are “animal friendly” in the vaguest, most decorative sense: fond of foxes, proud of their pets, but never found at a protest, never observing a hunt, and never in the thick of the work that once characterised the organisation.

This gulf between the campaigning League that got results and today’s respectable, brand-protective charity explains, more than anything else, the wave of expulsions.

The Shifting Landscape of the League

Against this backdrop, the Hales legacy should have strengthened the League’s ability to expose cruelty and challenge bloodsports. Instead, substantial funds appear to have emboldened senior management to consolidate power. Appointments of individuals with scant campaigning experience, paired with a suspicion of anyone with too much, have reshaped the organisation’s internal culture. Long-serving trustees, vice presidents, local group leaders, and lifelong members — people who built the League and preserved its integrity — have found themselves ejected as if they were an inconvenience rather than an asset.

Questioning the Motives

The expulsions raise unavoidable questions. Why remove those who know the organisation best? Why silence members with decades of commitment? Many of those pushed out were vocal in their concerns about the League’s drift away from meaningful campaigning. Their expulsion looks less like governance and more like housekeeping: clearing out dissent rather than addressing it.

Public Attacks as Justification

To justify these removals, senior management have resorted to public attacks, painting expelled members as disruptive, obstructive, or relics of a less “professional” era. These portrayals jar sharply with reality: many of these individuals were the very people who made the League’s victories possible. The narrative of “standing in the way of progress” rings hollow when the progress in question seems to involve sanitising the organisation until no passion, backbone, or dissent remains.

The Cost of Internal Conflict

This internal warfare has consequences. Supporters who once saw the League as a home for principled, determined activism now see an organisation uncomfortable with passion and allergic to criticism. Alienating the grassroots risks not only donor confidence but the League’s moral authority. Meanwhile, public disputes over expulsions undermine the League’s credibility, distracting from its core purpose at a time when wildlife needs an uncompromised advocate.

Moving Forward

If the League Against Cruel Sports hopes to reclaim its relevance, it must confront the widening gulf between its activist past and its corporate present. Transparency, respect for internal critique, and an honest recognition of the value of grassroots passion are essential. The League’s legacy was built by people willing to stand in fields at dawn, document cruelty, and challenge powerful interests. Replacing them with brand-protective managers and hobbyist “animal lovers” is not progress — it is decline.

Only by honouring its history and reconnecting with the people who carried the organisation for decades can the League hope to regain the moral clarity and effectiveness that once defined it.