The trouble with tweed

We live in a funny old world full of unfunny people. Our leader's war aim is peace, the rich and selfish pretend to be poor and selfless, and the "beautiful people" are nothing of the sort. But for sheer, brazen hypocrisy nothing really gets close to the antics of the Countryside Alliance and its massed, tweedy ranks of bumptious bigots.

This Sunday, we Londoners will have to give over our roads to a quarter of a million of these fervid Little Englanders, who, in my experience, like nothing better than to level a shotgun in the general direction of a weekend rambler and snarl: "Get off my land."

It would give them a taste of their own medicine if all the community charge payers along the route of the Alliance's two marches were to dig up the Tarmac, or swivel the signposts. That's what a lot of landowners do if there's a public right-of-way running across their precious wheat. Precious indeed, because a third of the farmers' income is provided by Government and European Community subsidies.

So, which of your paymasters do you hate more, you country folk: Blair or Brussels? A mere 25 per cent of British farms produce 80 per cent of the food, the rest are uneconomic hobby enterprises sustained by cash handouts and sentimentality.

Marching for your livelihoods, are you? Where were you lot when the miners or the steelworkers lost their jobs because the Tory Government would have no truck with subsidies?

Still, there's little chance of you losing your way as you canter through our city. The route you've chosen doesn't go anywhere near the estates of city folk who are as genuinely poor as the least well-off of your supporters. Because there are some poor country folk - of that I've no doubt. Poor, deluded people who know no better than to tug their forelocks and go trotting off after their Barbour-clad bosses.

The landed gentry always prate on about the livelihood of their peons, but for them all God's creatures are the same, whether they be foxes or stablehands, beaters or pheasants. The important thing is that the country show must go on, the "traditions" must be maintained - the traditions of elitism, snobbery and highly selective breeding (of people).

Yes, Countryside Alliance, you're the Tories who can't stand the free market; you're the libertarians who can't handle homosexual rights or decriminalising drugs; you're the defenders of Fortress Britain who get bankrolled by Brussels. You aren't old MacDonald - you're bloody senile.

This year, we urban taxpayers are meant to feel ever so bad about what happened to your herds and flocks, while last year you lot cheerfully stoked up the barbecue and trousered the compensation. Everywhere I went in the country in 2001, country people told me that it was the farming community themselves who were responsible for spreading foot and mouth! Even if you weren't all that culpable, there's little doubt that a sensible vaccination programme was frustrated by a tiny clique of self-serving meat producers.

Still, it's when it comes to hunting with hounds that you're at your most repugnant. The idea that this is an inalienable right only makes any sense if it is balanced by a similarly incumbent duty. And what could that duty possibly be, save for a responsibility for the careful maintenance of the countryside itself ?

Yet it's precisely the people who howl about hunting who have also been responsible for laying waste to hedgerow and woodland, while spraying pesticide willy-nilly. You wouldn't have been reduced to hunting foxes were it not for the fact that all the bigger game declined because of the loss of tree cover.

Fox-hunting is part of a tradition all right, the tradition of enclosure, deforestation and large estates. The fox wouldn't even survive on this overcrowded golf course of an island were it not for your trivial pursuit. It's being kept artificially alive so you lot can gallop after it. When it comes to baying one thing while doing another, you hound's-tooth check wearers take the biscuit. There's only one other group of people who are as blinkered and that's your opponents. Anyone who imagines that the painless death of a few feral canines is important is playing the game of morality with a pack of jokers. How I wish you could all hunt each other to extinction, then the rest of us could enjoy a peaceful Sunday.