Welcome back, England

On 19 February 2005 The Spectator’s cover bore the arresting headline: ‘Goodbye England’, and the sombre silhouette of a lone huntsman. The issue attracted much attention, capturing, as it did, the sense of something ancestral and precious being needlessly slaughtered, as hunting with hounds finally became a criminal act. This was a feeling that spread far beyond the hunts themselves: a fear that New Labour’s bizarre fixation with a single pursuit symbolised what Roger Scruton so eloquently describes in his book England: An Elegy as ‘the forbidding of England’: the repudiation of its particular institutions, emblems and customs, usually by...