It may be too late to save trail hunting

There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is that a combination of complacency, arrogance and the failure to get the public onside is what did for hunting.

It’s not really fair: arguably, without the disaster of the Iraq war, Tony Blair may not have felt he needed to chuck a piece of legislation at his backbenchers, like a juicy bone to a pack of hungry hounds. The hunting ban never was about animal welfare, but class hatred, Dennis Skinner declaring that the bill was ‘for the miners’. The ban, Blair later admitted, was ‘one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret’. (I didn’t have to look this up: it’s on a Countryside Alliance postcard that’s been stuck to my fridge for years.)

But now, 20 years after the Hunting Act became law, hunting people – despite hard work by some decent campaigners – are on the verge of getting trail hunting banned.