WHEN THE WRITER and campaigner George Monbiot appeared on the Today programme, a few hours before the Commons began to debate the Hunting Bill, he did both sides of the argument a huge favour.
Parliamentarians in favour of a ban are accustomed to shelter coyly behind various elegant rhetorical devices, talking equably of “animal welfare concerns” and “democracy”.
Monbiot, however, declined to veil his argument in any such diaphanous fig leaf. As an animal welfare issue, foxhunting comes in at about number 155, he said cheerily. Somewhere below coarse fishing in the cruelty stakes; of infinitesimal significance when compared with intensive pig farming, chicken-keeping or even rearing pheasants for driven shoots.
“This is class war,” he said, arguing that a ban on foxhunting is a crucial symbolic gesture, second only in importance to the banning of private schools, towards the abolition of the feudal society that persists in Britain. Admittedly, “not everyone who hunts is an aristocrat — far from it”. But the point is, they aspire to be: “The residual power of the landed class arises from other people ‘s aspirations.”
I think that the assorted small farmers, personnel managers, children, retired builders, recruitment consultants, packaging technologists and IT specialists of my own hunt, the Ashford Valley, would be astonished to learn that when they set off of an autumn morning to draw one of our more disgusting coverts — the ghastly abandoned quarry full of defunct washing machines and a scrub of lank bramble bushes comes to mind — they are hoping to be mistaken for toffs, but never mind that for the time being. The important point is that at last someone has said what everyone actually knows: that the imposition of a ban on foxhunting has nothing to do with democracy, nor will the lives of any foxes be spared in the process. On the contrary, more foxes will die, more horribly, when the ban comes into force. But very few people will see it happening, so it won’t be anything like as upsetting for anyone but the foxes. And the great thing is that a significant blow will have been struck against “the justifying myth of landed power we call chivalry”.
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In the process, it is true, a precedent will have been set, that goverments have the power to stop a minority group from doing what it does, for no reason other than that a majority of MPs dislike that minority group.But that is the beauty of grand symbolic gestures: they have their reasons, of which reason knows nothing.
This is an honest argument and striking, too, in its explicit echoes of the ideologies of — among other political groups — the Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge and indeed the Nazis, all of whom took energetic and virtuous satisfaction in the smashing of the cultural artefacts and the curtailing of the liberties of people of whom they, symbolically, disapproved.
People don’t often think of hunting as a cultural artefact, but of course that is what it is, just as a university or a great library or art gallery is. Such institutions consist of a mixture of physical objects and intangibles: scholarship, spirituality, community — and so does hunting. Its tangibles are our beautiful, familiar landscape of hedges, fields and coverts, the preservation of the fox as a thriving species and, of course, the foxhounds, whose bloodlines can be traced back for a thousand years. Its intangibles are those of conservation, community and an intricate complexity of lore whose value (like that of ancient languages) is not negligible merely because it is intelligible only to a handful of specialists.
In the end such things, however valuable, are of secondary importance to the biggest intangibles of all: our humane and graceful traditions of tolerance and liberty. In that context, it will be very interesting to see what happens now. One real possibility is that George Monbiot is right, that hunting is, indeed, the archaic manifestation of a decadent tradition. If that is the case, once the banning legislation is passed it will wither, and rightly so.
There is an alternative, though, and it is this: that ordinary citizens, with no more interest in foxhunting than they may have in petit point or paragliding, may find a precedent that allows hitherto respectable minorities to be criminalised on a whim so extremely sinister and illiberal that they overcome their traditional British apathy and join in the fight to resist it. That would mean for the present Government a row that goes on and on and debilitatingly on, towards and beyond the coming election, with a steady drip, drip of protest both legitimate and — by some of those who feel that since they are about to become criminals anyway, they have nothing to lose — illegitimate.
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I have no idea with which of these possible endings the story of foxhunting will conclude. But one thing is certain: that in agreeing to make a symbolic sacrifice of hunting, the Government has given a great victory to the very same animal rights campaigners whose activities in other areas it has described as “terrorism”. And that, from any point of view, looks like a really bad idea.
Jane Shilling’s book The Fox in the Cupboard is published by Viking, £16.99
Knickers to Posh
WHILE we’re on the subject of class war, let us not neglect the important contribution of Posh Spice, who was complaining earlier this week that, what with her husband’s multiple tattoos and his intemperate swearing, she feels she has married beneath herself.
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Evidently, no one from her high-born background has thought to tell the poor duck that it’s common to call people common. But I thought the whole point of David Beckham was that he is one of nature’s gentlemen (a turn of phrase that will doubtless soon be illegal and subject to a heavy fine).
Tattoos, it has to be said, are not intrinsically common. Crikey, Winston Churchill’s mother had one. And as a general rule, one’s own worst faults are generally the very qualities that one dislikes most in other people.
So, as we’re discussing noblesse oblige, Posh dear, would you care to say how ladylike you think it is, on a scale of 0-10, to tell the world that your husband wears your knickers?
Cut the Salt? Fat chance
I FEEL rather anxious about the Government’s attractive new role model, Sid the Slug, whose job it is to persuade us all to give up eating salt. Sid is vastly obese and has an expression of unrelieved melancholy, so it should be quite easy for many of the British public to identify with him. Some of us, though, are quite thin, generally cheerful and completely addicted to salt. Do we really want to resemble Sid in his gloomy, amorphous state of salt-free virtue? I am not convinced.
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Bags to fret about
IT SAYS in the paper that the stuff in my handbag is worth £577, and that I would be “absolutely devastated” if it were nicked. I had no idea I was walking about with such a treasure house. Quick, let us look and see what it contains. Hairbrush, about £16. Swiss army knife with a variety of blades, price unknown, as it was a present. Boots No. 17 lipstick in Blondie, £2.75 or thereabouts. Pen, Rymans, 99p. Roll of mints, 39p. Brick-sized sad mother ‘s mobile phone, £39.99. And, er, that’s it.
I would, it is true, be very annoyed if any of it were nicked, especially the knife. But the contents scarcely add up to £100. And now I’m worried. What’s everyone else got that I haven’t?