22.09.2004

Revolt of reactionaries

Eddie Ford reports on the protests against the ban on foxhunting and argues that we should take back the countryside from the capitalist farmers and aristos

Last week was certainly a bad one for reactionary Britain. After a painful seven-year stasis, parliament voted to ban hunting with hounds by 356 to 166 votes - two years after the Protection of Wild Mammals Bill was passed in Scotland. Additionally, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 was finally given effect. Walkers can now roam over hundred of square miles of the northern fells and the South Downs - with other parts of Britain to follow by the end of next year.

Such steps are modest, but nonetheless welcome. For our part we pay particular tribute to the role played by communists and working class militants in bringing this about, most notably through the mass trespassing campaigns of the 1930s.

Despite wealth and land, the aristocratic and land-owning elite - and their plebeian retainers and rightwing middle class allies - feel they are on the back foot. In 18 months time they face the possibility of a £5,000 fine or, worse, a maximum six-months jail sentence for indulging in their beloved ‘sport’ of foxhunting - which in actual fact enshrines and celebrates their control over the countryside and those that live and work there.

Of course, reactionary Britain does not easily relinquish its privileges. In the first line of defence stands the House of Lords and the threat of an ‘ermine revolt’ to sabotage the bill, thus forcing the Blair government to invoke the rarely used parliament act. For once we agree with Dennis Skinner - “Tell the House of Lords to go to hell,” But we go further: no reform of the Lords; abolish the second chamber.
Behind the House of Lords there stands reactionary Britain’s second line of defence. It is extra-parliamentary, well organised and quite willing to flout the law. On ‘black Wednesday’ - the day the hunting bill passed through the Commons - the Countryside Alliance held a protest in Parliament Square. There were violent clashes with the police - images of which provoked the Mail the next day to run the headline, “Civil war”.

Unsurprisingly, the reactionary mob outside parliament had their people inside. Oliver Heald, Tory rural affairs minister, proclaimed that the government was using draconian powers “in order to crush an aspect of freedom in rural communities”. Sentiments echoed, and amplified, by the rightwing press - which, showing the class nature of what is at stake, enthusiastically sided with the plummy yobs and aristos.

Britain is pictured as entering a new dark age - ‘our’ ancient liberties are being crushed by the Islington “liberal elite” and jack-booted ‘townies’ are fanatically set on obliterating “rural values”, and so on and so forth. “Totalitarian Britain”, squawked Simon Heffer in the Mail (September 17). Charles Moore, editor of The Telegraph, wittered on about how “we are in the territory of Martin Luther King, the Ulster Covenant and Votes For Women, where our rulers won’t let us be free”. True, the Moores of the world stood by Edward Carson and his violent opposition to Irish home rule. But his ilk expressed precious little solidarity with the black civil rights movement in the US or the suffragettes.

Notoriously, that Wednesday also saw five members of the ‘Ledbury set’ break onto the floor of the Commons (they are members of the Real Countryside Alliance, a hard-line splinter group.) Included amongst them are friends of prince Charles and the 21-year-old Otis Ferry, son of the faded glam-rock singer, Brian Ferry. Last May he was appointed the youngest ever joint master of the South Shropshire Hunt. Dazzled by fame, wealth and royal connections, The Observer went into fawning raptures: “They are the new revolutionaries - dashing, charismatic young men, with impossibly good bone features. But these latter-day Che Guevaras are not working class heroes. They are rural community heroes” (September 19).

Obviously untrue. The Countryside Alliance, ‘real’ or otherwise, is an organisation not of the rural ‘community’, but the rural aristocracy and bourgeoisie, who run the whole show and whose interests it serves.

We have been here before, of course - louder and bigger - in July1997. Then the Countryside Alliance mobilised over 250,000 into Hyde Park against Mike Foster’s Wild Mammals (Hunting with Dogs) Bill. The message is still the same though. Supposedly those who own and exploit the British countryside are benign custodians of nature who protect our ancient ways, amongst them being foxhunting - which, claims Max Hastings, writing in The Guardian, “gave English culture its leap and dash” (September 18). Nothing could be further from the truth.

British agriculture is run along strict capitalist lines. Nature has thereby been thoroughly denuded and impoverished. Flora and fauna alike has been eliminated - not least by the wanton use of chemicals. Whole tracts of Britain have been transformed into a monocultural desert. Indeed our supposed concrete jungles - the big towns and cities - often contain more wildlife than the countryside. In rural Britain one finds private wealth, yes. But also, at the other extreme, poverty and appallingly low wages. As to culture, it is one of dependence and deference. Workers are rarely organised and often rely on the whims and favours of their so-called betters, if they are to earn any kind of living.

What of sport? Vast areas have been forcibly cleared of people and then hacked, burnt and policed so that the rich can kill animals - not for food, but pleasure. Armies of keepers are employed to eliminate rival predators. Hence the extermination of wolves, eagles, peregrines and owls.

Not that foxhunting is anything other than modern. Mark Metcalf (editor of The rich at play: foxhunting, land ownership and the ‘Countryside Alliance’ 2002) points out that until the mid-19th century deer-hunting was the sport of the aristocracy. Killing foxes only became fashionable because of the “diminishing number of deer” and because new breeding techniques “created hounds” which could chase and catch foxes (The Guardian September 20).

Foxhunting, salmon fishing, grouse shooting, etc rely on the massive imbalance in land ownership which exists in this country. In England and Wales, 25,918,370 acres are ‘occupied’ by just 157,367 individuals or families. Put another way, 0.28% of the population owns 64% of all the land.

This pattern goes back to feudal times - and was taken to new heights by the enclosure acts of the 17th and 18th centuries and the harrowing and bloody expropriation of the peasant farmers. Merrie England was one big hunting ground for the nobility. During the reign of Henry II almost a quarter of the realm was royal forest. That was not simply a place where trees grew. It was land set aside for the king’s game, in which the nourishment of deer, boars and hares took precedence over the nourishment of the toiling masses.

Most of the rest of England was classified as “the chase”: the hunting grounds of the nobility. All these lands were governed by a brutal set of laws and regulations. We discover in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that William I “set up great protection for deer and legislated to that intent, that whosoever should slay hart or hind should be blinded”. In 1293 the English parliament - which represented the aristocracy, the church and the merchant classes - decreed that no proceedings were to be taken against foresters, parkers or warreners if they killed poachers who resisted arrest. Subsequent laws determined that a poacher was anyone who was not a member of the nobility or the propertied classes. To ram home the message, parliament in 1390 passed an act limiting the right to hunt to the 40-shilling freeholder for laymen, and to the cleric with an annual income of over £10.

The truth is obvious. There would be no foxhunting by hounds if it had not been for the state-backed robbery which dispossessed our ancestors. The same class of people who form the core of today’s foxhunters owe their lifestyle precisely to this historic injustice.

For all the rightwing prattle about “totalitarian Britain”, there is a clear democratic mandate against fox-hunting and other such activities. It is nonsense to claim that the campaign against hunting foxes with hounds originates with the urban elite or the Blairite political class.

True, the anti-foxhunting campaign inevitably involves crackpots, animal rights fanatics and a whole swathe of outright sentimentalists. But the demand to ban hunting with hounds commands a clear and obvious majority - both in the town and the countryside. Polls show this over and over again. Indeed a study conducted in 2000 showed that in rural areas 41% “strongly” supported a ban - less than 15% strongly opposed it. In a recent Mori poll, 45% of rural respondents had hunting with hounds taking place in their local area, yet 89% of them disagreed with the statement, ‘Hunting with dogs is an important part of my social life’.

It is vital to emphasis that communists in no way endorse any view which seeks the ‘revenge’ of the town over the countryside - or to punish rural workers with job losses. Newcastle University’s Centre for Rural Economy estimates that up to 700 people are employed directly by more than 300 hunts in England and Wales, with between 1,500 and 3,000 in related equestrian businesses. For those that cannot find alternative employment, there should be some form of compensation. Communists do not seek to exacerbate the town-country divide - quite the opposite. We need a programme to bring the countryside into the town and the town into the countryside: that is, we fight to humanise our environment. A start can be made with the nationalisation of all land.

Finally, some might object to state bans. That might be true, when it comes to state bans on the freedom of speech and political parties. But we communists do not turn that into a universal principle. For example, we certainly support a ban on the barbaric practice of female circumcision/mutilation. It was also a progressive step when the British parliament outlawed slavery.

Though we are unflaggingly ‘speciesist’ or anthropocentric - in other words we strive for the emancipation of humanity - communists also oppose cruelty against animals. We want to see foxhunting go the same way as bear-baiting. Such activities - along with their associated rituals - dehumanise the human being.