BY JOHN MUSGRAVE

On the eve of the new Hunting Season a well-meaning townie, a friend of a friend, said, ‘Isn’t it a bit rightist, dashing about hunting?’ 

‘Far from it,’ I told him. ’The main reason I took up trail laying all those years ago was as a result of a conversation with the huntsman and two ageing men, both foot followers.’

We were calling up hounds on a drover track late on a Saturday afternoon, on the eve of the ban. In a broad West Country accent one of the men said, ‘I thought Blair’d sorted it all out.’ I shook my head. ‘Blair’s not interested in people like you,’ I said. ‘We’re on our own.’

All three were what I’d call working class, speaking with local accents. Blair’s attack on so-called toffs was in fact a direct attack on the agrarian proletariat. 

How hard it was to accept it might all be over. All winter we had hunted over green fields, trees and mountains, flowers and forests. The two stragglers, Winston and Willow, scrabbled through the hedge, sterns wagging. 

The huntsman shrugged, clamped a roll-up in the side of his mouth and muttered that if he had to go to jail then so be it. Off he rode, a Clint Eastwood figure in the dusk, his eyes mirrors of the world outside. That was when I resolved to weigh in; help open this cage out towards the sun. Any government lawyer prosecuting our huntsman would have to get past me first. Our local MP, a good man, had been out to kennels and told us to lay trails. ‘When we get back in we’ll reverse the ban,’ he promised. Yeah well…

Tony Blair and his bourgeois meritocracy criminalised an essential part of country life, trashing a culture of which they knew nothing. How could Labour possibly claim to be left-wing as it stamped on the ruddy face of a rural yeomanry over a thousand years old?

Over the last 20 years better men and women than I have refined the art of trail-laying to provide a credible alternative to the foxhunting of old. It’s a rigorous system that should stand up in court. Apparently this is not enough and our new freebie-laden fiasco of a government plans to close us down altogether. This season could be our last. 

With a 157-seat majority and an incoherent political opposition, Labour reckons it has little to fear. Can the Starmer administration crunch through the next five years trouncing farming, abolishing hunting and collapsing Britain’s ability to generate electricity? It’s hard to credit. 

Net-zero heralds the new maths of a bankrupt Britain; an economy crashed by energy famine. Our last coal-fired power station closed down last week. North Sea oil and gas exploration has ground to a halt. British energy costs are now 77 per cent higher than those in the United States and 33 per cent higher than France. Small wonder our industries can’t compete. Electricity bills for farmers are through the roof.

Politics is no longer a case of left versus right. It is the struggle of the individual for freedom. It is the war against being bossed about by a contemptible authority. Hunting is at the forefront of this struggle.

Politicians of both complexions fail to realise the old polarities are disintegrating. Left and right do not matter anymore. If the Tories remain a toxic brand, the plaything of irresponsible capital, then Labour is a coven of apologists determined to neuter the success of the West.

By definition a free society means tolerating people of markedly different views to your own. Free speech is not just a privilege for the woke few, but the basic right of all men and women. 

The townie held his hands up, ‘Right, right, I get it…Yo!’

‘Good, but what will you…?’

‘Do? I’ll see you at the Opening Meet, old son,’ he said. 

What he means is, if you detest mindless authority, whether of left or right, take up hunting – and shooting and fishing. It’s the single best thing you can do to reverse the puke-purple tide of oppression.

Will the Self-Starmers last a full five years? Perhaps not, but the future depends on stout-hearted folk rising up as one and saying, enough is enough, no more. 

The two footies I spoke with that afternoon are long dead now. The huntsman has retired. Yet our hounds still hunt and their cry carries above through the autumn air. The horn has passed to a younger man. He has kids whipping-in who were not even born when Blair’s iniquitous Act was visited upon us. Such is the resilience of country folk. 

The song, Skyline Pigeon, itself is 55 years old now. The sentiments it echoes like the truths of the chase we serve will never die.

Once again, this season we shall run and ride, thinking of the way a wind can turn the tide and our shadows turn from purple into grey.  Turn me loose from your hands, we sing as we chase towards those dreams our forefathers left so very far behind……

John Musgrave is a writer based in the west country. His hunting novel, ‘Corsica Girl’ will be out on Amazon this month.