Racing need not fear Green party ‘conversation’ but must continue efforts on horse welfare

The Green party surged to record results at local and national level in last week’s elections, prompting Zack Polanski, the party’s leader, to suggest that two-party politics is “dead and buried”. Ladbrokes, meanwhile, subsequently cut the odds about the Green party winning the most seats at the next general election to 12-1, while an overall majority for the Greens is priced at 28-1.

Not likely, in other words but, at the same time, far from impossible. In the case of a majority for Polanski’s party, it is roughly the same price as Moon Chime, the winner of the big handicap hurdle at Haydock last Saturday. However the party fares in terms of seat numbers, the Green voice in the next parliament, in three years’ time or possibly fewer, seems sure to be significantly louder than ever before.

Since recent, or relatively recent, public comment regarding horse racing from significant figures in the party implies a strong abolitionist streak, these are interesting times for the country’s second-biggest spectator sport.

As the Sun reported – on its front page, no less – a couple of weeks ago, Polanski himself proposed the removal of “all animals involved in sport” on X in 2024.

Hannah Spencer, meanwhile, the recently elected MP for Gorton and Denton, said last month that there needs to be “a conversation: about racing, a few days after two horses sustained fatal injuries at the Grand National meeting.

“A conversation needs to be had about horse racing,” Spencer said. “We all saw those awful pictures of a horse that had been raced to death to make money for gambling companies. That conversation is coming. Those conversations are shifting. People are telling me they don’t think horse racing is acceptable either.”

The obvious question that prompts itself here is who and what, exactly, will this conversation involve? Will it just be Green party members and animal rights campaigners? Or will the 80,000 people whose jobs depend on the sport get a say too? And how about the fans who buy nearly 5m tickets to the races each year?

Spencer’s comment is infused with the language of animal rights based activism. It holds that the use of animals by humans for any purpose at all is wrong and by extension that it is not possible to cherish and respect racehorses and also ask them to race, which is what they were bred and born to do.

The phrase “raced to death” is particularly telling. No one is trying to kill or injure racehorses, but there is a – very small – risk inherent in asking them to compete, which the sport is constantly and consciously seeking to minimise.

The Cheltenham festival was tainted by some horse fatalities in 2026. Photograph: Adam Davy/PA

Racing is not a blood sport. The fatal injury rate on the Flat is one in every 1,000 starts. Over jumps, it is five in every 1,000. Unlike the millions of mammals that are killed for meat in the UK each year, in an industry that could also be said to use animals for “entertainment”, racehorses are not born and bred specifically to die.

Racing is also worth £4bn to the economy annually according to the British Horse Racing Authority and, while Spencer and at least some of her fellow Greens might not appreciate it, it brings a huge amount of pleasure and social engagement to millions of people each year at race meetings large and small across the country.

Antipathy towards the sport in the corridors of power is hardly a new phenomenon. According to Thomas Blake, the honourable member for Forest of Dean, racing is “an amusement which, though it may be innocent in itself, is the cause of enormous evil in almost every town throughout the country … [and] it is impossible to estimate the distress and misery caused by the speculation and gambling which attend all horse races”.

Blake was speaking in June 1878, during the annual adjournment debate on the day before the Derby when MPs debated – and, for many years, approved – a motion to adjourn until Thursday to allow them, in many cases, to head for Epsom the following afternoon.

His objections were based on an antipathy to gambling rather than any concern for welfare of the horses, but have a similar, abolitionist tone to Spencer’s view.

A century and a half later, racing is still going strong. My guess would be that, regardless of how politics plays out over the decades to come, it will be good for another few hundred years yet.

There will, at the same time, always be an onus on racing to emphasise, continue and highlight its efforts on welfare, but the sport has no reason to fear a “conversation”.

It would be helpful, though, to have it before the next election if possible, to get a clear understanding of what the Greens will, or will not, do to racing, and allow the sport’s fans and professionals alike to assess their votes accordingly.