WHAT is it all about, really? What do this week’s antics at Westminster mean to someone who has never sat on a horse, regards foxes as pests and frankly does not care much?
Banning hunting on Exmoor, I am told, is like banning football in Liverpool. Forget the ethics, a sensible politician does not do it. No more does he ban bullfighting in Spain, foie gras in France or assault rifles in Oklahoma. Yet hunting is to be banned.
So what signifies the demise of a sport that has dominated rural Britain since the Middle Ages? It is celebrated in Old Masters and inn signs. It adorns a million plates, mugs and tea towels. Hunting may be a minority activity but what a minority. It has been part of the picture of Britain since time out of mind. This is no trivial reform.
I believe the hunting vote marks a historic transfer of the spirit of rural Britain from country to town. It is the end of country life as morally autonomous, as setting its own rules of behaviour. The shift symbolically coincides with last month’s news from the UN, that within three years the world’s urban population will outnumber the rural.
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We are not just a nation of city-dwellers, we are a planet of them. The bond with the land is fast becoming a hobby, not a livelihood.
Britain’s so-called rural interest has long lived on borrowed tolerance. The hunting battle began when an overwhelmingly rural Parliament banned urban blood sports in the 19th century. It outlawed bear-baiting, cock-fighting and dog-fighting, against urban pleas to respect “our liberties and livelihoods”. Rural MPs denounced such sports as “cruel and unedifying”. The working class should set their hounds on artificial hares and spend their Saturdays watching others ride horseback. The town-dwellers had to obey. Jimmy Shaw, of Mile End, was stopped after his dogs had killed a record 26,000 rats in a year. Nor was foxhunting itself uncontroversial. Trollope, arch-propagandist in its cause, admitted that it was no pastime for a parson.
The rural interest then overstepped even this double standard. It claimed moral autonomy from those on whom it was financially dependent. I well remember the rage of phone-in programmes and e-mail responses during the foot-and-mouth upheaval and the countryside marches. While other citizens were expected to take the hard knocks of commerce, farmers demanded instant compensation, even to protect their beef sales in European markets. This cost £6 billion and was indefensible. No other victim got a penny. I do not recall the National Farmers’ Union saying either sorry or thank you.
I wrote then that hunting was dead. Now farmers are going farther and claiming the “right” to fill their fields with turbines, pylons, caravans and executive estates. Farmers are the chief applicants for planning permission to destroy countryside. This worm was bound to turn. On Wednesday night it did.
I always defend the freedom of minorities to enjoy pleasures that are harmless to others, be they smoking, drug-taking, pornography or foxhunting. I may not like them but that is not the point. Yet on hunting the libertarians have lost. Rural Britain is being refashioned on urban terms. The public wants to enjoy the sort of countryside it feels it has sustained for long enough to call partly its own. This is a landscape of rolling meadows, parks and coastline, of accessible fells and moors, of protected horizons, picture villages and farmers’ markets. Snobs may sneer at such a vision and call it theme-park Britain. But the contract was freely signed by both parties and the taxpayer has met his side of the bargain. He now wants the landscape managed to his moral comfort and personal convenience, whatever that may mean.
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To some farmers the last ally will be John Prescott. As chief planner of all England, he seeks the genetic modification of the landscape with his own terminator gene, urban development. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 begins the deregulation of rural planning. It offers a true final solution to the post-agricultural conundrum, concrete. Mr Prescott agrees with Ferdinand Mount (in his essay on British class, Mind the Gap) that the countryside should be given to the lower orders for cheap housing as an act of class atonement. Farmers may make a killing as they go, but go they will.
The tragedy of the hunting debacle is that it can only hasten this awful prospect. If only the farm lobby had been less greedy for subsidy and compensation. If only farmers had not so polluted their image. If only they had welcomed planning control, refused wind turbines, welcomed the right to roam and in general seen public income as implying public obligation. Come to that, if only they had opted for hunt licensing last year, how different things might be. This campaign has not been well done.
Hunting is no longer the issue. The urban majority has asserted sovereignty and the political terms of trade have shifted. Besides, over the former hunting fields of Britain a far more earnest battle will next be joined. Mr Prescott’s new Act has the potential to make the death of hunting seem a mere skirmish. His Viking longships are sliding over the hills and meadows with only rape and pillage in mind. Even farmland in the Cotswolds is now being sold for speculative building plots. Ending foxhunting is a preliminary to the suburbanisation of all Britain outside national parks.
The survival of what most decent people must surely regard as uniquely precious — the rural landscape — now depends crucially on a new alliance. It is between that landscape’s only plausible custodians, farmers, on the one hand and its new political masters, the mass of urban country-lovers on the other. It is a coalition of many people despised by farmers in the past and people who may have now deprived them of their favourite sport: ramblers, tour operators, nature conservationists, bird-watchers, weekenders and hobby farmers. These must be encouraged to become the new Virgils of the shires. They must stand together or lose what both proclaim to treasure.
On Wednesday the country lobby went to Westminster and met its Waterloo. It must now pay homage to a new master. For its own survival it must learn to love its enemy.
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simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
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