This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

It was an unexpectedly moving conversation. We were standing there naked in the woods, halfway through a 14 mile walk, and the former schoolteacher I’d been chatting to for the past hour was recalling the happiest day of his life.

He had retired in the spring a couple of years ago, and the following summer when he was out with his usual naturist crowd somewhere in the Home Counties, one of them had suggested a group photo (group photos, I came to learn, are quite a thing amongst nudists).

Up until that point, as a teacher, he’d always felt it wise to duck the group shots, just in case one of them ended up on social media, and anxious parents started crying “pervert”.

He realised, though, that finally free from the threat of Surrey mums, he could say “yes” and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, full frontal with the men he’d walked naked with for so many years.

One of the great things about being a journalist is getting to spend time with people who are into very different and sometimes quite unusual things.

You could be forgiven, if you are a regular reader of this column, for thinking I only ever go fishing, stalk deer and walk-up snipe on bright winter mornings, but I often have the pleasure of spending time with slight oddballs such as the fanatical twitchers who travel the world looking for rare birds, psychonauts from the free party scene, and old men who go naked.

I’m in no rush to start dropping acid, I don’t really get twitching and I prefer life with my pants on, but what you notice when you’re with these people is how much it means to them.

What I came to realise in the woods that day, is that there are people out there for whom going trouserless with like-minded guys is all they’ve got.

And so to politics. Labour is not a friend of rural people. From farmers to landowners and gamekeepers, the very mention of the Labour Party is almost always met with grumbling.

Fitting up normal rural people as toffs is not radicalism as I understand it

It’s just over two decades now since they cynically banned fox hunting, in a move that Tony Blair himself admitted he later regretted.

I was told recently about a West Country landowner who sat next to Sir Tony at a dinner not so long ago. Blair apparently admitted that he had come to realise that hunting isn’t actually just for a load of toffs, but generally a cross-section of the rural community, including lots of the rural working class.

No doubt, there were people trying to tell the former PM that very thing all those years ago, but he was too focused on fighting the good fight and winning all those middle-class votes to worry about ordinary people who were set to lose so much.

Just like that teacher in the woods and those spangled ravers dancing in that rainy Welsh quarry, there are farmers for whom almost nothing matters more than hearing hounds in full cry on a bright autumn morning.

Labour has promised it will truly rid the countryside of hunting this time round. It’s an easy win for the timid toolmaker’s son who wants to posture as a radical without really spooking the horses, but fitting up normal rural people as toffs, as a sop to the urban middle classes, is not radicalism as I understand it.

Lazy vote-winners no doubt seem inconsequential when they’re being knocked up at party HQ. Why not ban pheasant shooting? Why not ban snipe shooting? What about a ban on salmon fishing? Salmon numbers are in decline, after all.

There are arguments for and against most things in life, but banning pastimes — frankly, no matter what they are — must be recognised as something that will ruin people’s lives. Sure, maybe not all that many people, but minorities matter.

Something might not be your thing, just as getting naked in the woods isn’t mine, but to other people, understand that it might really be all they’ve got. When it comes to hunting, to misrepresent reality in pursuit of political advancement, as Labour has done again and again, is unforgivable.