THE flames of protest lit up the Worcestershire skies last night as hunt supporters kicked off their battle against the latest Parliamentary efforts to ban hunting with hounds.

At Offerton Farm, Warndon, just outside Worcester, piles of hay spelling out the slogan "No Ban" were set on fire as part of a Countryside Alliance curtain-raiser to a mass demonstration in London tomorrow when the Hunting Bill returns to the House of Commons.

The beacon was one of 12 burning across England and Wales and marked what CA West Midlands regional director Clare Rowson called "The end of the phoney war."

"The return of the discredited Hunting Bill means things are hotting up and we will make it as hot for the Prime Minister as we possibly can," she added.

"This Bill is nothing to do with animal welfare, that has been proved over and over again by every report that has been commissioned into hunting.

"It is all about Tony Blair appeasing a faction among his backbenchers who are engaged in what they see as a class war and they are even mistaken about that.

"When the Hunting Bill was thrown out by the House of Lords last time, it was the Labour peers who voted it down. The assumption that the land-owning Tories scuppered it was completely false. It would have been lost if not a single Conservative peer had voted."

Tomorrow, when the Bill returns to the Commons, more than a thousand protesters from a dozen hunts across Worcestershire and Herefordshire will travel to London to take part in a demonstration in Parliament Square.

They will join others from across the country, as the Countryside Alliance ups the ante in its efforts to defeat legislation which Government ministers have threatened to use the Parliament Act to force through if the House of Lords rejects it again.

Worcester MP Michael Foster, a prominent anti-hunt campaigner, said, "It is time the will of the House of Commons prevailed and this matter was sorted once and for all."