The new hunting year formally began last week. Should I resubscribe? Politically, the outlook is bleak. In February, Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, announced that Labour would implement a ‘full ban on trail and drag hunting’, on the grounds that there were ‘loopholes’ in Labour’s hunting ban. This even though, when advocating the original ban, Labour said it favoured drag hunting (trail hunting had not then been invented) and was worried only about live quarry. Mr Reed included his ban promise in a speech in which he announced that his party would treat rural voters with ‘greater respect’. His two aims conflict. The idea that chasing a scented rag – an activity which no one could regard as cruel – should be banned because some might exploit it to chase a living creature is like banning cars because of speeding. It is illiberal. Far from showing greater respect to rural voters, it insults them. One consequence would be that packs of hounds will no longer have any permitted activity. Their bloodlines, their skills, the hounds themselves, all will die. Looked at politically, the thing makes no sense, except – to use an unsuitably un-vegan metaphor – as red meat to throw to the animal-rights monomaniacs of the Corbynite hard left. Tony Blair made a similar gesture with the 2004 ban. He came publicly to regret the resulting ill feeling, waste of parliamentary time and bad law. Sir Keir Starmer is right to think that rural votes are there for the asking. Traditional rural loyalty to the Tories has frayed, notably over crass regulation, planning, attacks on farming and monstrous energy costs. He may think trail hunting is a ‘many not the few’ issue, but in reality he would do much better to let sleeping hounds lie. The statesmanlike answer would be to announce a Law Commission review of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, involving all rural interests. In the meantime, more in hope than expectation, I shall resubscribe.
We live a few miles from Hastings, my beloved birthplace. Over the bank holiday weekend, most of it was without water due to a Southern Water mains burst. A friend sends me his frontline report. It took him an hour to drive across town because of the water queue at Asda: ‘On the way I spotted a Nigerian colleague waiting for a bus which would surely never come, with a 12-litre pack of water in his hands. I gave him a lift and joked about how embarrassed I was as I had grown up being told about African children having to walk miles for water and now he was having to do the same in Hastings! He corrected me: “Actually no, I never had to do something like this in Nigeria… if you are middle-class, you drill your own bore hole and have a water supply with filtration system and generator. I had to come to England for this experience.”’ On the front, where my friend saw ‘many more people than usual bathing in the sea’, the cafés were thriving: ‘Only their espresso machines, which are mains-fed, could not work, so the flat white mochaccino drinkers had only filter coffee to subsist on. Several times I was approached by concerned-looking DFLs [Down From Londons] who asked me for the nearest café they could purchase “real coffee”.’ Bumping over potholes into St Leonards, he ‘reflected on the fact that the world-leading infrastructure Decimus Burton built the town for is very much a thing of the past’.
Southern Water, my friend says, ‘are the nemesis of Hastings and St Leonards. We are encircled by their failings. On our seaward side, they pollute our beaches to the point that we are frequently not allowed to swim and people who do can become quite ill. Their mismanagement of sewage has led to two major floods in the past 18 months which have devastated town-centre businesses. Ugly industrial pumps have been dumped on the beach to remedy this; supposed to be temporary, but no work has begun to replace them. And now, from the north, they cannot even supply us with drinking water.’ W.H. Auden says, ‘Thousands have lived without love, no one without water.’ Southern Water seems to be defying Hastings to live without either.
Some time ago, I wrote that the actress Olivia Colman, then about to play the late Queen Elizabeth in The Crown, might be unsuitable because she had a ‘left-wing face’. I caused offence but meant none: it was simply something I had noticed. I am pleased to receive from a reader scientific confirmation of my general point – an online first posting of the American Psychological Association entitled ‘Facial Recognition Technology and Human Raters Can Predict Political Orientation From Images of Expressionless Faces Even When Controlling for Demographics and Self-Presentation’. The authors, Kosinski, Khambatta and Wang, claim that their predictive model from standardised images of 3,401 politicians in the United States, Britain and Canada showed such recognition. Their other experiments confirmed the point. For example, conservative types ‘tended to have larger lower faces’. Liberals, however, ‘tend to smile more intensely and genuinely’. The authors warn: ‘Our findings underscore the urgency for scholars, the public, and policymakers to recognise and address the potential risks of facial recognition technology to personal privacy.’ I’ll say: if one mugshot can reveal a person’s politics, no conservative will get a job in the public sector or the BBC ever again.
It was a discouraging MI6 intelligence failure that its head, Richard Moore, failed to notice that the Garrick Club, of which he was a member, did not admit women. Only when he read Amelia Gentleman’s pieces in the Guardian about this shocking state of affairs, which had persisted for nearly 200 years, did he resign. There are now two sorts of grand London clubs – gentlemen’s clubs and Gentleman’s clubs. All latter-day Widmerpools keen on an Establishment career will in future prefer the latter.
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