On 19 February 2005 The Spectator’s cover bore the arresting headline: ‘Goodbye England’, and the sombre silhouette of a lone huntsman. The issue attracted much attention, capturing, as it did, the sense of something ancestral and precious being needlessly slaughtered, as hunting with hounds finally became a criminal act. This was a feeling that spread far beyond the hunts themselves: a fear that New Labour’s bizarre fixation with a single pursuit symbolised what Roger Scruton so eloquently describes in his book England: An Elegy as ‘the forbidding of England’: the repudiation of its particular institutions, emblems and customs, usually by municipal authorities and liberal elites.
Much has changed in the last three years, however. All that was written in that issue remains true. But the political and social context has mutated with remarkable speed, to produce a new configuration of pressures and possibilities. This special issue, in celebration of St George’s Day on 23 April, explores this evolving landscape.
The most striking change has been that issues which were once debating points for constitutional theorists — the ‘West Lothian Question’ and the Barnett Formula — are now live political issues.
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