Perhaps the most obvious question about the government’s proposed trail hunting ban is: ‘How did Labour end up here?’ The warnings from history could not have been more stark. Tony Blair, Labour’s most successful Prime Minister, has openly said that the original hunting ban was one of his biggest mistakes and that row saw Labour candidates rejected in rural constituencies for a political generation.

In 2020s Britain, trail hunting is certainly not a populist measure, indeed, if you ask voters what their priorities are, next to no one will ever mention hunting with dogs. Likewise, if you polled the parliamentary Labour Party, no more than a handful of MPs would consider trail hunting a pressing matter. Yet Keir Starmer’s 2024 manifesto, which otherwise said next to nothing about the countryside, committed to a ban on trail hunting. Partly this results from Labour’s Byzantine processes which include a National Policy Forum (NPF) made up of 200 representatives. This body develops policy and produces a final report which is agreed by Labour conference and it is from that report which its manifesto is drawn. A few activists willing to navigate the corridors of power inside the party can, therefore, obsessively pursue an agenda like trail hunting.

The other side of the question, however, is why the party leader chose to adopt the proposal on hunting, but to leave out many other policy proposals from the NPF? The answer to that goes back to the then Labour leader, Keir Starmer, and the fact that - as the Labour Party has admitted by ditching him - he lacked both a political antenna and the backbone to face down internal opposition.

So Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, has been left with a manifesto commitment that is a million miles from his stated priorities and a process towards legislation which is already underway. If No 10 wants to take further soundings on whether to allow that process to continue, it could do worse than consider the accounts of the League Against Cruel Sports which reveal that its membership fell to just 1,500 in 2025. This is not an organisation that can even pretend to have mass support and indeed so bad is its plight that it has gone down the route of many failing animal rights groups before it by appointing Chris Packham as its President. I take solace from the fact that if you are on the opposite side of an argument from Mr Packham you are almost without exception on the right side of the debate. The Prime Minister should take note of that too.

As our Campaign for the Countryside has made clear, it is time for a rural reset and nothing could be more symbolic, or more sensible, than the government ditching the trail hunting ban.