Some Sympathy With These Concerns

This looks as if the Conservative Party has not only given up on the towns, but started to despair of the countryside, too. The Coalition parties have given the countryside plenty of cause to despair of them.

There were clear parliamentary majorities to ban hunting in the Major years. Only procedural tricks stopped it from happening.

Anti-hunting Tory MPs are characteristically very right-wing: Roger Gale, Teddy Taylor, Ann Widdecombe, Anthony Beaumont-Dark, Alan Clark. Liberal Tory toffs are usually not just supporters of hunting, but participants in it.

The hunting heartlands of Yorkshire, the Midlands, Wales, Devon and Cornwall have returned few (or for a time, in the Welsh and Cornish cases, no) Tory MPs in recent years. By recent, though, I mean all the way back to 1997, a voting generation before the next General Election.

I have never supported the hunting ban, and I was quite beyond disgust when Tony Blair and my then MP, Hilary Armstrong, used it to cajole Labour MPs into supporting the Iraq War; neither Blair nor Hilary went on to vote for the ban in the end.

But the idea that repealing it, in part or in whole, would somehow offset the enormous cuts to rural incomes and services, the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, the privatisation of the Royal Mail, and the ongoing shambles over broadband access, is an incomparable insight into how both absentee landlord parties regard their electoral fiefdoms.