Huntsmen sure to make a point

So, it's up with the dawn to make Brighton rock. Ian Shakespear is a working man, no bones about that. Mild-mannered and straight-talking, he doesn't appear as your kind of saboteur-inthemaking, but he might be today. He has been a huntsman since the age of six, born and bred not far from these boggy fields set amid the North Downs.

Is he expecting trouble today, a repeat of the so-called Parliament Square civil war of nearly two weeks ago? "No, no one wants that but we have to make our point."

This morning from Surrey to Oxfordshire, Northampton to Devon, men like Ian Shakespear are heading to Brighton.

It's just light and Ian 29, opens the doors of the Surrey Union Hunt Kennels. The 80 or so hounds cascade out. Normally Ian - the kennels manager - would be preparing them to hunt foxes. But like his colleagues elsewhere around the country, up to 25,000 expected to arrive in Brighton today, this morning they are after a different prey: Tony Blair, their own slippery fox, and his Labour Party on the day Blair gives his crucial conference speech.

Ian knows that most of the people inside that Labour concrete bunker think that hunting people are toffs with contorted faces, red-raged from privilege.

But there are no grouse moors and few plums in your mouth around this part of Surrey. Ian's father was a builder from Chertsey, his mother a housewife. He runs the kennels with a staff of two. "People look down their noses when they know what I do thinking I am some upper-class idiot. But I am like every other working person". On his 45 acres, there are nearly 100 hounds and six horses. He lives in a small timber-framed tied cottage, works 13 days in a fortnight and is on call almost all hours. What does this so-called toff earn then? "Probably about as much in a week as you earn in a day. Not a lot." But it is "not a lot" which will become nothing quite soon if the proposed hunting ban goes ahead. His fiancé¥ is a groom to a nearby hunting stables which also supplies the local hunt. "If this ban goes ahead, all of us lose our jobs and our homes. And all of these" - he nods at the hounds scurrying around us - "are put down."

Amazingly, Ian knows each hound by name as he stands in the fields feeding, among others Lollipop, Denmark and Bundle.

Through the dawn mist, he selects the hounds we are today taking to Brighton. It is hard not to feel sympathy for him. You would either have to be extremely hardhearted or a rabid class warrior to imagine he is gentry clinging to a feudal past.

This is Weald country, vale and woodland, and the Surrey Union Hunt rides out across an escarpment of the North Downs between Guildford and Dorking.

This area, stuck as it is near their commuter towns, is curious because it is bang in the middle of the battle lines between town and country.

When he is not hunting or looking after the hounds, Ian is in the Flesh House. This is an ugly small warehouse where he and his co-workers perform tasks which are a cross between a vet and an abattoir. I watch as thirty or so young and dead calf skins are made ready to feed to the hounds. As a townie you may recoil. But this is country business.

"The calves have to be put down or die naturally. We as the Hunt are doing the local farmers a service by clearing up a stock they can neither sell nor keep."

The hounds, 20 of them, are now in a transporter ready to roll. One of the Hunt's masters, Mark Spake, says as we prepare to leave: "I never thought I'd be one of those people who find themselves in the middle of conflict."

Off to Brighton we go amid diesel fumes, boots, a coach of supporters, hip flasks of various sustenance and waves from those left behind. "Good hunting", someone laughed as we all rolled our eyes. We shall see.