Please David Cameron, listen to the people's opinion on hunting

83 per cent of the public agree that the fox hunting ban should not be repealed. Will the PM listen? Not a chance

Avon Vale hunt making its way to the village of Laycock, Wiltshire, as the law banning fox hunting is in "tatters", according to the Countryside Alliance (PA)

Let me take you briefly back to the year 1516. Thomas More, in his Utopia, wrote: “The desire of bloodshed of beasts is a mark of a mind that is already corrupted with cruelty, or that at least, by too frequent returns of so brutal a pleasure, must degenerate into it.”

I’ll just briefly reiterate, that was 1516. 499 years ago.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given that we are now half a good, solid half-millennium on from that, a brand new poll has shown that a quite whopping 83 per cent of the public agree that the fox hunting ban should not be repealed, including 70 per cent of Conservative voters.

But will overwhelming disdain prevent government forays into repealing laws over the last of the real blood sports? Abso-bloody-lutely not.

As David Cameron told Countryside Alliance back in March: ‘A Conservative Government will give Parliament the opportunity to repeal the Hunting Act on a free vote, with a government Bill in government time.’ Whips and Ministers had set aside parliamentary time for a vote, eventually not called after severe threats from the SNP, but a manifesto pledge by the Conservatives means that it’s most like going to be back on the Westminster agenda sooner rather than later.

Now, firstly, it’s such a shame that this is an issue that may well hog a good deal of the political limelight over the course of the next few years ultimately there are subjects of far, far more importance (the NHS and education to name just a couple) than the welfare of an animal that’s actually doing fairly well population-wise in the UK.

But hunting has to be tackled and tackled properly because fundamentally, I don’t particularly want to live in a country in which bands of horn-tooting barbarians are legitimately allowed to range across the countryside tearing innocent animals to shreds in the name of having a bloody good old laugh. And now it’s been confirmed that the vast majority of this country seem to agree.

Democratic legitimacy aside, the point is that there is just such heavy symbolism of retrograde brutality ingrained into the reintroduction of fox-hunting.

There could simply be no more overt sign of a nationalistic Britain’s acute social regression because, and I realise that this is a fairly blatant point that has been made again and again, there is no difference between hunting foxes with hounds and bear baiting or cock fighting (both banned in 1835, that’s 180 years ago). All have the same basis of sadistically prolonging the death of an animal for the sake of human enjoyment.

I’ll take you to a couple of brief extracts from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (bound in manuscript in the late 14^th century). ‘Right before the horses feet the hounds fell on the fox… and the lord raised him full suddenly out of the ravening mouths.’ And then ‘huntsmen hied hither with horns full many… It was the merriest meet that ever men heard, the ripe roar raised there for the fox’s soul’.

Tearing foxes up is literally what people used to do for a laugh in the Dark Ages.

Of course we’ve all heard that fox-hunting is a ‘tradition’ and thus deserves the right to ring-fencing but, clearly, the basis behind this is pretty risible. If tradition were enough of a reason not to ban anything, children would still be wearing dunce hats at school and Cameron’s lot would be enforcing Prima Nocta on our wedding nights.

Thankfully, 21^st, 20^th, 19^th and 18^th century logic has blown away most of the more brutal traditions of the past but fox hunting, despite being officially ‘banned’, hangs on as a brutal vestige in, what is generally speaking pretty civilised country. And we don't just have to make sure that the ban is upheld but that the hunts that do still exist are cracked down on.

The fact that it remains a part of political dialogue just smacks of the most basic sort kind of facile cronyism. You can just imagine DC sitting around the oaken dining table at one of his friend’s houses in Chipping Norton (they’re all wearing those blood red hunting jackets in my mind) with a few ruddy cheeked chums. After a bawdy toast one them gets him into a headlock: ‘Come on David, give us our hunting back or I’ll get Rollo and Tarquin and Hugo to towel whip you just like they used in the showers. Do you want that David?’

You just know that there’ll be a ruddy good piss-up at the Blue Boar Inn as they all chortle away knowing that they’ve ‘hilariously’ defeated the desire of the rest of country. Cameron will never have to buy a pint of Hooky ever again.

But obviously, as I’ve been told a few times before, I’m just a city boy who doesn’t get it and maybe, with the wind rushing through my hair, the braying of hounds in my ears and the scent of blood in my nostrils I’d finally realise what the fuss is about but, then again, I’d probably rather just spend my time doing something that isn’t tantamount to torturing an animal for my own enjoyment.