The Huntsman Blows His Bugle Horn

And so another Boxing Day comes round.

The hunting ban has never commanded popular support. Most people could not care less.

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 most anti-hunt types still want to eat, and in favour of killing far fewer foxes, by far more humane methods, than the ban compels.

Doubtless, the anti-shooting people will yesterday have stuffed themselves with broiler turkey.

The hunting ban, and this can never be said too often, was the means by which Tony Blair and Hilary Armstrong, both of whom went on to oppose that ban in the Division Lobbies, cajoled disgraceful Labour MPs into voting in favour of the Iraq War.

Many things need to be done in order to break definitively with that wicked period. One of those things is the repeal of what is in any case a ludicrous piece of unenforced, because unenforceable, legislation.

Who cares about food poverty, or fuel poverty, or any poverty, when we have knocked the red-coated toffs off their horses? I do, let me assure you.

As part of a much broader push for the rural votes that the Coalition has put well and truly up for grabs, Labour needs to promise the free vote on repeal that David Cameron has entirely failed to hold. 

Thinking of which, consider quite how right-wing anti-hunting Conservatives, who were enough to deliver a majority for a ban in the Major years until parliamentary procedures were used to stop them, have always tended to be on every other issue: Alan Clark, Ann Widdecombe, Sir Teddy Taylor, Sir Roger Gale, Sir Anthony Beaumont-Dark, and so on.