If You Are Still Playing Class War You Haven't Woken Up

When I came off my horse at speed the other day I was surprised by some of the responses. The riding community, of course, were universally sympathetic, especially when they knew my mount had fallen down a rabbit hole - which is one of those random accidents you dread and which you can do little to avoid. But the bikers all wanted to tell me that it would be have been scarier coming off a Ducati; the petrolheads insisted that riding to hounds had nothing on the raw terror of racing round a circuit; and a Northerner on my Telegram group felt compelled to tell me that I should try sometime going into a rugby scrum against a team of giants with cauliflower ears, flattened noses and bollocks the size of Spacehoppers.

“Look lads…” I wanted to say, “It’s not a competition.” And while obviously I approve in general of the fine male tradition whereby anything any other man does to amuse himself is basically proof that he is gay, what I liked much less was the accompanying whiff of class war resentment. “If it’s a toff’s sport it can’t be nearly as dangerous or exciting or real as my honest, horny-handed, working class male’s pastime,” seemed to be the underlying message.

I’m sick of this divisive nonsense. I have a particularly low tolerance for it when it comes from people who think they are on the Awake side of the argument: people who think they’re more authentic than me because they weren’t tainted by my public school and Oxford education; people who think that now I’m down the rabbit hole, they get to decide how much or how little I should earn (based, apparently on how much they do); people who think because I am - or was - Establishment, I’m therefore partly responsible for the disgraceful sell-outery of my former friends and acquaintances; people who look at videos I post of myself out hunting and respond in any other way than: “You go, James! Great to see you in your happy place!”

Almost the best thing about my Awakening these last few years has been discovering just how much I love my fellow man. I felt it on those London marches and I always feel it at my events: this extraordinary sense that no matter what our skin colour, or religion, or sexuality, or sex, or social background, we were all made in God’s image. We were all totally on the same team. Us against Them.

By Them, of course, I refer to the Rulers of the Darkness of this World: the narrow Predator Class who since time immemorial have sought to control us and exploit us through the age old trick of divide and rule. They invented the concepts of racism, antisemitism, religious schisms, animal rights, veganism and class warfare. When we indulge these resentments we play Their game. If you do not yet understand this you can never count yourself fully awake.

I tried explaining this point to one of my fellow riders while out hunting in the Cotswolds on Saturday. “There’s only one thing I’ve ever done which comes even close to matching the joy of hunting…”, I said. “Sex?”, she said. “Well that too,” I said. “But I was actually thinking of being pilled up at a rave in the early days of Acid House.”

That feeling you get when for days afterwards you can’t stop thinking about how good it was to be with your people. Reliving every moment. Wishing you could be with them again, just so you could bore one another rigid with all your favourite bits, be it a banging floor-filler or your five most terrifying stone walls, hedges or post-and-rails. They say that hunting is the closest peace-time approximation to the intensity of combat. You become a Band of Brothers (and Sisters), united by the thrill of shared danger, faced unflinchingly, jubilantly and heroically overcome.

Which isn’t to say, of course, that people who do rugger or motor-racing or climbing or grouse-shooting or grouse-beating or boxing or fencing or scuba-diving or sailing or football or even pubgoing can’t rise to similar heights of communal ecstasy. These are all, in their way, celebrations of what matters in life more almost than anything: living in the moment, enjoying one another’s company, exulting in our common humanity. I’d never be brave enough to tackle an All Black or, frankly, even the skimpiest, slowest full back from the crappest local rugby team. All I would expect of those who play rugby, but don’t hunt, is the respectful acknowledgement that they in turn would probably never be brave enough to tackle jumping over a four-foot hedge on a beast that could crush them in a trice.

One of the many things I like about hunting is that it’s such a great leveller. No matter how old you are or how rich you are, you all do the same size jumps (or not, as the case may be: no one judges you if you choose gates instead). But just because I love the sense of unity that the hunting field engenders doesn’t mean I think it would be a better world if only the City lawyer with his eight hunters, groom and undergroom in his Cotswold stone stables were reduced to the same income as an NHS nurse on her part-shared nag. We’re all different; we’ve all made our choices and compromises and sacrifices; we all have talents, which put us at an advantage, and defects which put us at a disadvantage. Just so long as we recognise that we’re all children of God, the rest is for the birds - and for God, and only God, to judge.

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