The Countryside Alliance thanks all in Worcestershire and Herefordshire who gave up their Sunday on September 22 to be part of the display of people-power which brought over 400,000 people into London to march peacefully for liberty and livelihood.

It was also gratifying to see so many representatives of the regional media travelling down on coaches and trains with the marchers and giving very fair and balanced reporting.

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming success of this event has brought detractors and denigrators out of the woodwork.

Some politicians have asserted, absurdly, that the hunting lobby 'hijacked' the march. But it is pretty difficult for us to have hijacked our own event! The Alliance is the main defender of the rights of those who wish to hunt - although we are far more besides.

The march was conceived, planned and run solely by us and its purpose and themes decided entirely by us.

Leading organisations across the rural spectrum 'bought into' these and marched with us in solidarity on a range of issues other than hunting, but every one of these organisations endorsed all our event's founding principles.

We have also seen attempts by single issue groups to belittle both the numbers and the nature of the demonstrators.

One 'survey' claimed to show that nearly all the marchers were Tory voters and from wealthier AB socio-economic groups. To suggest that this should disqualify the marchers' legitimate, non-party political, concerns would anyway merely betray class bigotry, but in any event such disingenuous 'findings' should be treated with the disdain they deserve. Think about it, how do you select an unbiased representative sample of a few hundred out of 400,000 people on a demonstration?

We also saw assiduous political attempts to pass off as 'muddled' the message of this, the largest demonstration in the UK's history. But any muddle is in the minds of the politicians, not the demonstrators!

The event's message was crystal clear; the unjustified political attack on hunting has united the countryside behind the hunting community and behind an uncompromising demand for our politicians to do something for rural communities them rather than to them.

The Alliance believes that to help the Government behave more constructively the countryside needs a new unified voice, in the form of a new Rural Council based on TUC lines, on which the Alliance and all other major organisations would be represented as equal partners.

The Alliance has set to work to help get such a body up and running as soon as possible.

Clare Rowson (Countryside Alliance Regional Director for Worcestershire and the West Midlands), Hagley, Stourbridge.