25.11.2004

Foxhunting is a class issue

Last week the rarely used Parliament Act was invoked in order to force through the Protection of Wild Mammals Bill and ban hunting with hounds in England and Wales. This was the culmination of a long, seven-year slog, which saw reactionary mobs violently protesting in Parliament Square, the Blairites torturous yet futile struggle for a ‘third way’ compromise and, of course, repeated attempts by the House of Lords to sabotage the bill and hence defy the will of the House of Commons, which in September voted by a clear majority to ban hunting with hounds. So, as from February 18 next year, it is illegal.

Of course, right to the very end, the whole debate and parliamentary process around the issue was dogged by prevarication, fudge and confusion. Under pressure from the government front benches, MPs agreed by a majority of 151 to delay the implementation of the bill - but only to July 2006 rather than 2007, which was the government’s preferred option. Not unreasonably, suspicions were aroused that the government was trying, yet again, to scupper it. However, within hours the peers, by a margin of 153 to 114, voted to reject the 18-month delay, triggering the Parliament Act. Thus, thanks to the strenuous efforts of the peers, those directly employed in the hunt are facing joblessness in three as opposed to 18 months time.

The numbers involved are not large, despite Countryside Alliance propaganda. It has been estimated by Newcastle University’s Centre for Rural Economy that up to 700 people are employed directly by the 300 or so hunts in England and Wales, with between 1,500 and 3,000 in related equestrian businesses. Nevertheless it is important that rural workers are not punished with unemployment. There must be compensation for those who lose their jobs.

From next year we can now look forward to a situation whereby the aristocratic and land-owning elite, not to mention their little army of plebeian retainers and rightwing middle class allies, can receive a £5,000 fine or a maximum six-months jail sentence for indulging in their beloved ‘sport’ of foxhunting.

On the other hand, we have no love for foxhunting. The sooner it went the way of bear-baiting and cock-fighting, etc, the better. Such activities and rituals dehumanise the human being and inflict unnecessary levels of cruelty and suffering on the animals. Therefore, the Protection of Wild Mammals Bill can be critically defended and, of course, the Countryside Alliance should be firmly opposed.

Despite the prattle of the rightwing press there is a clear democratic mandate against foxhunting - both in urban and rural areas. Polls have shown this to be the case over and over again. It is also arrant nonsense to claim that the campaign against foxhunting is the peculiar obsession of the Blairites or envious ‘townies’ out to stomp all over ‘country values’. In reality, the defenders of foxhunting, and all related activities, are representatives of the minority rural aristocracy and bourgeoisie, who run the entire CA show and whose narrow interests it serves.

The day after the bill was passed, the CA’s legal team went to the high court to lodge a request for a complete judicial review of the Parliament Act, claiming that it has always been illegal (despite the fact that it has already been used four times, once by Margaret Thatcher herself). Somewhat ironically, given the high Tory nature of the CA, they will also be appealing to the ‘Brussels bureaucrats’, arguing that the ban on hunting with hounds is a breach of the European convention on human rights, which enshrines the right to the “enjoyment of property”. By most accounts, the CA’s legalistic bid to retrieve foxhunting is doomed to failure.

Then of course, for our outraged aristos and capitalist farmers there is always the second line of attack - the road of extra-parliamentary resistance, direct action and civil disobedience. Indeed, there is a distinct whiff of ermined sedition and rebellion in the air. We read that least 40,000 hunters, including some from the Prince of Wales’s local Beaufort Hunt in Gloucestershire, are threatening to join meets across the country on February 19, in a massive defiance of the law. There are 318 registered hound packs in England and Wales, including 184 foxhound packs and 20 harrier packs. A not insubstantial force.

Militant landowners are threatening to wreak havoc on public services by blocking access to their property, preventing railworkers from getting to tracks and utility companies from maintaining electricity pylons and gas lines. It seems that the Real Countryside Alliance and the Countryside Action Network, both of which have been described as the “Hezbollah wing” of the CA, are behind many of these schemes.

All partisans of the working class should take this ugly rumble of discontent seriously, seeing how these reactionary malcontents are fanatically inclined, well organised and connected … and armed, unlike the working class. When we examine the pro-foxhunting forces, we see a future anticipation, or outline, of what the vanguard of counterrevolution would look like under British conditions.

The true significance, and importance, of the foxhunting debate came from what might seem at first glance to be an unlikely source. Writing with admirable clarity in the august pages of The Sunday Telegraph, Peter Bradley, Labour MP and unpaid parliamentary private secretary to rural affairs minister Alun Michael, said that the hunting ban was an act of “class war” against reactionary-establishment Britain and then went on to boldly declare: “Ultimately it’s about who governs Britain. That’s why they oppose the right to roam and a ban on hunting. For them it’s ownership of property, especially land, and not citizenship, that confers privilege” (November 21).

Frankly, our complaint is that the Blair government has no intention of aggressively pursuing the class war in the countryside and never will. The foxhunting ban was forced upon Blair by mass pressure. It does not constitute an integral part of a democratic programme for the radical reorganisation of the whole countryside. Indeed his government, not least Alun Michael, are committed to further intensive capitalist development in farming and a greater centralisation of ownership.

All the babble from the CA, the reactionary peers and the rightwing media about protecting ‘rural values’, ‘conservation’, etc, is just hypocritical cant. So too is the idea that foxhunting with hounds somehow represents some sort of wonderful ancient tradition. These people and their ancestors have ruined the British countryside and use it for profit and sport to the exclusion of the broad mass of the population. That is what their ‘rural values’ amount to, that is what they want to ‘conserve’ and that is what their snarling defence of foxhunting is all about.

Actually foxhunting is a relatively new pursuit. Until the beginning of the 19th century, deer-hunting was the chosen sport of the aristocracy. However, our ‘conservationist’ aristocrats hunted the deer, and other species, to near extinction, so had to find new prey. New breeding techniques meant that horses and hounds were capable of attaining new peaks of running and jumping, and hunting clubs with annual subscriptions were founded. In other words, to all intents and purposes, foxhunting was a Georgian invention, not a ‘tradition’ going back to the 14th century, as claimed by The Guardian and others.

Of course, the very existence of foxhunting, like grouse shooting, etc, depends in the very first place on the massive imbalance of land ownership. 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 is a pattern that goes back to feudal times, when 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, and it almost goes without saying that the nourishment of deer, boars, hares, etc took precedence over the needs of the toiling masses. It was in this way that most of England was classified as “the chase”

But with the brutal enclosure acts of the 17th and 18th centuries this expropriation of the peasant farmer became even more bloody and harrowing. Vast areas were forcibly cleared of people, just so the rich could kill wildlife. The aristocratic and rising bourgeois landowners felt compelled to employ armies of keepers in order to eliminate rival predators - such as wolves, eagles and peregrines, which were systematically eliminated, as were the forests, which shrank dramatically in size.

Self-evidently, there would have been no foxhunting if it had not been for this monstrous, state-backed robbery which evicted our ancestors and denuded nature itself. Essentially, the same class of people who form the core of today’s foxhunters owe their lifestyle precisely to this historic injustice. By virtue of this fact, every hunt or “chase” is an act of class war in and of itself, since it is a triumphalist confirmation of the ‘natural order’ which has the rich and landed expropriators at the top and the propertyless working class at the bottom.

Karl Marx often referred to the “devastating” effects of “deforestation”, which he viewed as resulting from a reckless and exploitative relation to nature, whereby “the development of civilisation and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison” (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 42, New York 1975, p559 ).

Specifically, Marx decried the fact that the woodlands of England were not “true forests”, since “the deer in the parks of the great are demure domestic cattle, as fat as London aldermen” - while in Scotland “the so-called ‘deer forests’ that had been set up for the benefit of huntsmen (at the expense of rural labourers) encompassed deer but no trees” (Capital Vol 1, New York 1976, p892-93).

Marx was certainly an ‘eco-warrior’ and indeed scientific communism is thoroughly imbued with ecological concerns in the fullest sense of the term - that is, his ecological awareness was inextricably bound up with the revolutionary struggle to emancipate humanity from all class exploitation and oppression. What a contrast to the petty bourgeois and parched politics of the Green Party.

Nowadays, British agriculture is run along strictly capitalist lines. More natural flora and fauna have been eliminated. Nature lies battered, strangled and starved. The wanton use of chemicals is near universal. Whole tracts of Britain have been transformed into a monocultural desert in the interests of capital. Rural workers face impoverished lives, appallingly low wages and miserable or non-existent public services. Meanwhile, the concrete grey cities often contain more wildlife than the countryside. Here, with a paradoxical vengeance, is the town-country divide which Marx so decried.

The ruling classes have brought ruination. Only a working class programme can restore the countryside for the benefit of all.