Here in Lanchester, we are seen across the nation and the world, with BBC News 24 covering the Braes of Derwent Hunt this Boxing Day.
But the Beeb couldn’t resist parroting the anti-hunting line that the ban “still” commanded overwhelming popular support. It doesn’t, and it never has done. Most people “still” couldn’t care less. And among those who could (massively concentrated, on both sides, in rural communities), opinion is “still” overwhelmingly opposed to the ban, i.e., in favour of the safety of the sheep and poultry whom must anti-hunt types still want to eat, and in favour of killing far fewer foxes, by far more humane methods, than the ban compels.
Wealth inequality in Britain is now greater than at any other time since records began. Social mobility has not only ceased, but gone dramatically into reverse. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drone on. Seventy-two billion pounds are about to be wasted on yet more pointless nuclear weapons. Yet we can’t even pay the Police properly. And so on, and on, and on.
But never mind. At least the red-coated toffs have been knocked off their horses, so high a priority for Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Bevan and Gaitskell.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t, and that they haven’t been.
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Hunting, it would seem, is more popular than ever, but I have seen absolutely no evidence that the ban has not been well received by the overwhelming majority of the population, which is firmly committed to the New Morality (which states that if you like something then it's good and if you don't then it's bad). It's possible that most of the Antis don't actually think huntsmen should be put in prison, which is ironic because as draconian as the new law is it has still led to hardly a single prosecution.
ReplyDeleteThe overwhelming majority of the population, even including most people in the countryside, is wholly unaffected by the hunting ban, and so receives it neither well nor badly. They simply don't care. But then, they never did.
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