ANATOLE KALETSKY’S article is spot on (Comment, September 16). Of course it’s all about class. I was brought up in a terraced house by a socialist father and was the first member of my family to go to university. We felt we were the new classless society. I held back from from voting Labour for years because I was alienated by all the class hatred generated by union leaders, particularly Arthur Scargill. In the 1990s I became what I thought was new Labour; I vote for “ education, education, education”. and felt that Labour was finally worth trusting.

Silly me. I failed to read page 93 of the manifesto where the pledge to ban foxhunting must have been hidden; how many of those voting Labour in 1997 gave it a moment’s thought? It was hardly a priority then, and it most certainly isn’t now. In my innocence I imagined new Labour to be the party of free choice.

Needless to say, I have never hunted, yet I feel very strongly about the government’s motives and methods. The hunting ban could yet prove to be a catalyst. What I now most dislike about the Government is its insistence that it knows best how we are to live our lives.

Anne Crew,
Wigton, Cumbria

Fight on the beaches

SIMON JENKINS (Comment, September 17) greatly exaggerates. The hunting debate was not the country lobby’s Waterloo. It was its Dunkirk.

The Conservatives have pledged to overturn this law if they return to power. The hundreds of thousands of supporters of foxhunting should now direct their energies not to antagonising people by disruption, but to campaigning vigorously for any parliamentary candidate who will restore the right to hunt with dogs. In the vast majority of cases this will mean supporting Conservative candidates.

We could then see D-Day landings at the next election.

Ronald Forrest,
Wells, Somerset

Culture clash

SO ENDS one of the most entertaining sessions of the House of Commons in modern history, but we should reflect. What remains, apart from endless civil unrest? This is not class war, pace Anatole Kaletsky, it is middle-class “townies” against middle-class country-dwellers, whose crime is not foxhunting (few of us do), but owning a different culture and voting Tory. Does no one care about the hunting dogs? One hundred and ninety thousand will have to be put down because they cannot live outside the pack and are no use as household pets. Even this pales beside the loss of human livelihood. And they call foxhunting cruel.

A terrible revenge will be enacted by the country folk. Hunts were seldom very successful in killing foxes, but now many thousands of these vermin will be massacred by far crueller methods: snares, gassing, poisoning, which will also affect pets and other wildlife. Foxes could be almost extinct (outside towns) in a generation.

Nigel MacNicol,
Oakham, Rutland