Leading article: Ill-conceived and unenforcable

Not everything that is wrong is illegal. Nor is everything that is illegal necessarily wrong. When it comes to making laws there is a lot more to take into account. The débâcle of the ban in hunting shows why.

This newspaper has made no secret of its distaste for the business of setting hounds on to a fox to tear the exhausted animal limb from limb. But nor are we enthusiasts for smoking, adultery or obesity. There are some subjects where social disapproval is a more appropriate reaction than the blunt instrument of the law. It may even be counterproductive, as with hunting which now has more active followers than ever before.

Related articles

• Tally-ho! Hunt followers ride roughshod over failing law
• Henry: Master of Fox Hounds in the West Country: 'We're killing as many foxes as ever'
• Phillip: Master of Fox Hounds in the east of England: 'If I see a loophole, I gallop through it'

The police are, perhaps wisely, doing little to enforce this badly drafted, poorly conceived law. We live in a pluralist society in which morality is increasingly relative. There are wide disagreements on many issues, of which the proper balance between animal rights and human liberty is but one example. But good law requires consensus and that does not exist; indeed there are parts of the country - where hunting takes place - where the consensus is pretty much anti-anti-hunting. And disregard for authority is encoded in English DNA.

In the past we argued that Parliament had better things to do than legislate on an issue which was totemic for all the wrong reasons, smacking as it did of the facile posturing of an outdated class war. Politicians should not have wasted their time on this. Nor, now, should the police. Aggressive enforcement risks undermining the consent of the public to be governed. Animal rights activists will be indignant but inaction is, here, the right course of action.