I DON'T like columns that rant. It may be an easy way of getting a full postbag, but it's lazy. And far from promoting debate, the claim often made, all it does is promote more rants, from people who don't listen to anything anyone else has to say.

But today I'm struggling not to have a good rant. Today I'm angry.

Fox hunts have announced they are considering applying for public handouts. The reason? They are rural businesses like any other, and they too have been hit hard by foot and mouth.

You have got to hand it to them, they've got some gall.

You would have thought, with the popular mass movement to ban fox hunting which surely even this Labour government can't ignore for long, that the hunts would have been lying low. Keeping their heads down in the hope nobody will notice them. Not a bit of it.

It takes breathtaking arrogance, not to mention a supreme indifference to the views of ordinary people, for the hunts to take the step they have at such a time. As usual, it is dressed up in hypocritical language about rural ways of life. The jobs of good, honest hunt employees are at risk, we are told.

You can just imagine the conversation between Lord Bufton Tufton and the man at the ministry - whichever ministry it is these days that deals with rural affairs.

"I say, my man. Few problems on the old monetary front, what? What say you arrange a little compensation, something to keep the wolf (not, of course, the fox) from the door, ha ha!"

Man from the ministry (doffing his bowler hat): "Certainly, sir. Would a loan be all right, or are you looking for something more permanent? A grant, perhaps?"

"Oh, one was thinking more along the lines of a grant, I should think. We've had to lay two men orff, you know - good men they were too, salt of the earth."

Now if local hunts really have had to lay staff off because of hard times - well, then, I feel sorry for those men. No doubt they have families to support, and I feel sorry for them, too.

But pouring public money into the capacious pockets of the landed gentry in the hope they will allow a little of this largesse to trickle down to the horny handed sons of toil who serve them, caps permanently adoff - I feel my blood boil at the very thought.

Huntin' and shootin' types tend to get apoplectic with rage when anybody questions their right to indulge in their bloody, messy past-times. You don't understand the countryside, they bray. The subtext is: you don't understand that we own the countryside, and we will do what we like.

OK, so let's take the gloves off. I don't believe it is simply because they feel sorry for foxes that people detest hunting. Anybody who eats meat - and that includes me - in some way colludes in cruelty to animals, whether we like it or not.

No. The bitter feud between huntsmen and the anti-hunt movement is about something quite different. The furore over hunting is symbolic of a wider struggle: that against privilege, rank and an ingrained, centuries-old habit of deference.

Deference stunts the soul. All the signs are that, at long last, we are growing tired of it. That's why New Labour, against all its small 'c' conservative instincts, has been forced into reform of the House of Lords.

It is why, eventually, it will be forced into abolishing hunting.

Hopefully, by trying to make use of the very compensation mechanisms designed to protect the people they secretly despise, the hunting lobby will simply have outraged public opinion even more - and brought that longed-for day closer.

It can't come too soon.

There will always be new inequalities to take the place of old ones. It's human nature. But we'll fight that battle when we come to it.