Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Now add Cruelty!

THERE WERE huge sighs of relief from the hunting, shooting, Land- Roving brigade on Friday when Mike Foster's Bill was talked out in the House of Commons. One of its opponents, the Labour MP Kate Hoey, argued in the Daily Telegraph that a ban on hunting "is unenforceable, it is an attack on a freedom long cherished by citizens, it will destroy jobs and communities and, crucially, it will do nothing for animal welfare". These are not sentiments which sit comfortably with Tony Blair's image of his party as vigorous, modern and forward-looking, They are also nonsense. If the bill is unenforceable, why do people who ride to hounds object to it so strongly? As for freedom, the only thing that's under threat is their insistence that they cannot enjoy themselves without inflicting suffering on animals. I hardly think that "Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Cruelty!" is going to catch on as a rallying cry.

No one is suggesting that the minority of people who enjoy galloping across fields on a sunny morning should be forced to give up their hobby and congregate instead at acid house raves in Brixton. But to elevate a rather costly field sport into a way of life is the kind of sophistry we can expect to hear more frequently now that MPs have begun to scrutinise activities whose supporters are unused to being called to account. In spite of the efforts of saboteurs, people who hunt have never been placed so dramatically on the defensive before.

Now they have, they are coming up with arguments very similar to those put forward by the bosses of Formula One when they faced a ban on tobacco advertising. We're suddenly expected to believe that thousands of people, far more than any of us ever imagined, rely for their survival on the continuation of hunting with hounds. On Thursday, the Daily Telegraph gave prominent coverage to a report of an inquest headlined "Gamekeeper in fear of hunt ban killed himself". It suggested that 63-year-old Donald Sedgwick, who came from a "proud family of country people" took an overdose of paracetamol mixed with whisky because he feared the Foster bill would take away his livelihood.

Towards the end of the report, it was revealed that what Mr Sedgwick actually feared was losing his job and his home - a prospect which the coroner described, in this particular case, as "quite a long way down the road". Ill-founded though it seems to have been, Mr Sedgwick's anxiety is a commentary not on the likely effects of the Foster Bill but on the system of tied cottages which still operates on many large estates.

Agricultural workers tend to earn wages which do not enable them to buy even small houses, while dismissal or redundancy is often accompanied by the threat of eviction from homes they have inhabited most of their working lives.

WHAT Mike Foster has flushed out, more by accident than design, is the continued existence of a way of life which denies employees' rights which are taken for granted by people who work in towns and cities. Grooms, kennelmaids and gamekeepers depend on the caprice of their employers to an extent unthinkable to the rest of us. If their jobs are in jeopardy, it is because some of their employers have been threatening, out of sheer pique, to get rid of the horses, dogs and deer on which their livelihoods depend.

What is astonishing is the way in which those few moments at the end of a chase, when an exhausted fox is torn apart by dogs, have been turned into the sine qua non which sustains the very identity of the British countryside. Realising that the issue is not going to go away, Kate Hoey has come up with a very New Labour fudge in the shape of a new Parliamentary group called - groan - the Middle Way. Along with two MPs from the other major parties, she is suggesting that hunts should be licensed "so that if codes of practice were breached, suspension of the hunt would follow". But this is missing the point on a grand scale. No set of rules can get round the chief objection to killing animals for pleasure, which is that it happens at all. And the failure of Mike Foster's bill should not blind us to the fact that we are witnessing a significant shift of opinion in the population at large.

After the initial, favourable coverage of last weekend's Countryside March, other voices quickly began to be heard. Many observers, far from being convinced that farmers and hunters are getting a raw deal, asked searching questions about why the rest of us should support an agricultural system that is feudal in structure, heavily dependant on subsidies, and involves farming practices which landed us with BSE. Whether or not the protesters who marched on London last weekend are representative of country- dwellers as a whole, they may come one day to regret their eagerness to turn the spotlight onto a way of life which has survived into the 20th century largely by not drawing attention to itself.

FOR THOSE of us whose idea of fun does not involve the sacrifice of small mammals, last week's big excitement was the release of Madonna's new CD, Ray of Light. I was initially worried by reports that Ms Ciccone had got religion, like many artistes before her, although the lyrics of "Frozen", the first single to be released from the album, suggest an immersion in psychotherapy ("You waste your time with hate and regret/You're broken/when your heart's not open"). But it turns out that the current direction of her somewhat complex spiritual journey - the Cabbala, apparently - hasn't done her musical output any harm at all.

On the contrary, the new CD includes her best track for years. Starkly entitled "Skin", it builds up from a slow start into a dazzling, storming evocation of sexual longing. This is what I like most about Madonna, her insistent linking of women and desire in ways which forcefully acknowledge the existence of feelings women sometimes think they should deny. Unlike most superstars, and throughout her dizzying changes of appearance, she has never abandoned her exploration of sexual identity. In a welcome contrast to those rather sentimental Madonna and child pictures in glossy magazines, Ray of Light triumphantly demonstrates that her music is as dark, daring and emotionally gripping as ever.