Monk, at this stage my preference is to distance angling from fox hunting. The whole subject of FH is just too emotive.
In terms of the march, I just thought it was all too confused about why people were there. All I heard was "lets get away from the FH debate, this is about homes, jobs, transport, schools as well as pursuits".
Well, let me tell you something, I have the same problems living in a town, if not worse. Housing is a nightmare. A small twin bed house (really small) goes for ?220K. My house, a 3 bed detached, not massive, just valued at ?400K. Now I am lucky work wise, but if I had to start from scratch, even on my reasonable wages I couldn't even buy a first time house in our town. Oh, and by the way, we are not in a school catchment area (even though 2 schools are within 2 miles) so we had to send my daughter to a private school, no choice. I also watched my father die 2 years ago, holding his hand on a trolley in the corridor of a shite (only) local hospital.
And I have very little sympathy with farmers. I know too many that went to my university, and their attitude towards the countryside was appalling. It was all about cutting hedgerows, dredging drainage ditches, polluting the environment with insecticides and chemicals (proven to be the reason the fish in my club lake now do not reproduce) and taking massive subsidies. Some of the smaller holding farms are trying to transform on the back of organics, and I genuinely wish them luck.
Sorry, this may aggravate a few, but I thought the whole thing was confused and pointless with a complete lack of clarity of what the real messages were. It did nothing for me.
Wow – that’s better.