BY JOHN MUSGRAVE

This Boxing Day morning thousands of folk will gather on cobbled squares to greet their local hunt. Packs of hounds and squadrons of horses will clip-clop down the highway to cheers and applause. Gabled inns will do a roaring trade in mulled wine, cider and ale. Old friends greet one another. Hounds cast about the crowd for titbits delighting children. It’s a party like no other.

Such a jovial rendezvous is in marked contrast to the seething mobs of antisemitic terrorist supporters which have latterly disgraced our streets. As on every Boxing Day the real Britain will be making a welcome appearance. Level up supporters, topers and riders and the sum runs into the hundreds of thousands. 

The Boxing Day Hunt is as traditional as the Union Jack, saucy postcards and plum pudding.

After spirited speeches by men in red coats and feisty women on horseback, many will pound off after hounds on foot. We realise this is the only way to live. We do not need horses to hunt. All are welcome. Older folk take to the Field of Honour in a succession of MoT-challenged vehicles and push bikes. Runners and hikers swing up to the hills, guided by the call of the horn and the distant carols of the pack. Trail layers smudge the horizon – on foot and horse.

This year crowds are expected to be larger than ever. Many are concerned at the return of a Labour government at the next election. Labour tried to ban hunting 18 years ago. It failed and Tony Blair regrets the whole absurdity of it. We are still here yet we face a renewed threat of the most grievous kind. The message of Boxing Day is a simple one: We shall not flag or fail. 

We may hunt pre-laid trails but we hunt steadily on and are winning the argument. This is a sport tied in with the ethnicity of the countryside. We have always hunted since man first stood upright on that distant plain. 

Emboldened, we fight in the media and in the courts. We shall fight with growing confidence on the air; we shall defend our sport whatever the cost may be. We shall hunt in the orchards and the pastures, we shall hunt in the fields and in the beets, we shall hunt in the hills; we shall never surrender. 

Hunting happens to be at the spearpoint of the pushback against woke, political correctness. It’s the flank-turning weapon shoving back the dead hand of an authoritarian culture; a culture hellbent on destroying the moral compass we took from a shed in Bethlehem long ago. By turning up and supporting the Boxing Day meet, supporters are helping the pushback, leaning on the spear shaft if you will.

Please support your local hunt this Boxing Day. Our cause should not be suffered to fail among men. 

Andy the Trailayer aka John Musgrave