STEPHEN GLOVER: We must unite against Starmer's attack on our pastimes

Labour has just completed another U-turn. It has partially backed down over imposing inheritance tax on farms. In trying to grab a small amount of extra tax revenue, it has alienated many in the countryside.

Not that these people will easily forgive the Government. They are naturally relieved that the threshold for paying inheritance tax has been increased from £1million to £2.5million (double that, if a farm is jointly owned by spouses or civil partners).

But many in the countryside remain convinced that Labour doesn't understand their way of life and believe that, even with less oppressive rates of tax, lots of family farms won't survive.

If Sir Keir Starmer were a wise politician he would try to reassure voters in the countryside. After all, in the 2024 election Labour won more than 100 rural seats in England, many for the first time. Don't these require some tender loving care?

The answer seems to be 'No'. Almost on the same day last week that the Government partly retreated over inheritance tax on farms, it announced a policy that is certain to meet with fierce opposition in many rural communities. It intends to ban trail hunting with dogs.

Not fox hunting. That was banned by Labour in 2004. But Tony Blair's government permitted trail hunting, where hounds follow a scent that has been laid across fields and ditches, with horses and huntsmen in fast pursuit.

It sounds innocuous, possibly even futile. But activists who hate hunting allege that some foxes are inadvertently or deliberately chased, and sometimes killed, though no definitive numbers have been produced. Hunting folk privately admit that this sometimes happens.

We're not talking big numbers, though. Possibly a few hundred foxes (who are, remember, pests that kill lambs and chickens and anything else they can get their teeth around) each year.

Is it politically worthwhile, or indeed morally defensible, to drive hunts out of business (which according to their defenders contribute £100million a year to the rural economy) while destroying a way of life enjoyed by thousands of people? And all for a few hundred foxes?

If Labour gets its way, many hunts in England will give up the ghost. In Scotland, where trail hunting was outlawed by a mean-spirited and urban-minded nationalist government in 2023, nearly half of hunts have already closed.

The pattern will be repeated south of the border, where there are many more hunts, if the ban goes ahead. Hundreds, if not thousands, of foxhounds would be put down as hunts couldn't afford to keep them if they had no purpose. All for a few hundred foxes. At most.

I appreciate some readers may dislike hunting. But one has to be a very doctrinaire person to approve of the closing of hunts, the culling of dogs, the loss of jobs, and the sheer pain and unhappiness that would be felt by thousands of our law-abiding fellow citizens.

How could Starmer be in favour of such an outcome? He is of course a quintessentially metropolitan man who probably has a pretty vague idea of what happens outside the M25, in town and country alike.

I suspect he shares the prejudices of the anti-hunting brigade, who generally look through an urban lens, and are sometimes motivated by class envy, even though these days most hunts have many distinctly unprivileged members.

For the most part, though, Starmer probably hasn't thought about hunting. He knows that most of his MPs are against it, and that the 2024 Labour manifesto undertook to outlaw trail hunting. He may well think it's a rather unimportant matter. If so, he is about to make a fatal mistake.

Tony Blair also hadn't thought much about hunting before his administration set out to abolish it. In his autobiography he admitted that the issue brought him more 'grief' than any other. 'One of the strangest parts of politics,' he wrote, 'is how you get into situations of unbelievable controversy without ever meaning to or wanting to.'

Blair began to realise that hunting 'wasn't a small clique of weirdo inbreds delighting in cruelty, but a tradition, embedded by history and profound community and social liens, that was integral to a way of life'.

By the time he arrived at this realisation, it was too late for him to stop the Bill outlawing the killing of foxes. But a compromise of sorts, which allowed trail hunting, was cobbled together.

Starmer is about to find himself in far choppier waters than Blair. His administration is much more unpopular than was his predecessor's in 2004, and he is even more unloved. He has also just upset many in the rural community with his ill-fated smash-and-grab raid on farmers.

Needless to say, I don't maintain that everyone in the countryside supports trail hunting. Egregious environmental campaigner Chris Packham recently described Tiverton hunt in Devon as 'ethically and morally bankrupt' while the town council declared, without obvious public endorsement, that the hunt was 'not welcome'.

But there are many in the countryside who passionately defend hunting, and an even larger number who, whether out of respect for their fellow citizens or an appreciation of tradition, warmly support it.

In towns and cities, too, many will agree with Nigel Farage's remark last week that, in seeking to ban trail hunting, Labour are 'authoritarian control freaks'. Reform's leader was happy to be photographed, pint in hand, at a Boxing Day hunt. He thinks he is embracing a popular cause.

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I believe that even those who don't like the idea of killing foxes should join it. For we are talking about the right of our law-abiding fellow citizens to pursue a pastime sanctified by tradition. A pastime, moreover, that isn't usually intended to result in the death of a fox.

If Labour is able to deprive people of their freedom to pursue an enjoyable and harmless social activity, it will come next time for others of whom it disapproves – those who shoot and fish, even those who enjoy watching horses jump over fences.

Whatever our predilections, we should defend the rights of reasonable minorities, whose views don't conform with those of the Government of the day, to enjoy themselves as they think fit.

Dissenting, respectable minorities are despised by Labour. In October 2024, it criminalised trying to dissuade a woman from having an abortion within 150 metres of a clinic, and created so-called 'buffer zones'. The law requires no proof that such behaviour has distressed or influenced anyone else.

This legislation had been introduced by the Conservatives – shamefully in my view – but Labour chose to drop draft guidance that silent prayer should still be allowed within buffer zones. A woman was charged just before Christmas for silently praying outside an abortion clinic.

Where will this end? Nigel Farage is right. We have a Government of authoritarian control freaks which is increasingly imposing its values on those who happen not to share them. That is how I see the prospective ban on trail hunting.

I hope and pray that blundering, interfering Starmer will be seen off, and that country people and defenders of liberty will unite in opposing Labour's latest attempt to stop decent people doing what they want.