CENTRE POINT
How the animal rights movement taught Labour's Militant Tendency a trick or two
SIMON JENKINS
The modern hunt saboteur no longer sprays aniseed and drops ballbearings under the hooves of the Quorn. Instead he hollers at extraordinary general meetings of the National Trust. A Tube ride to West- minster Central Hall is more fun than get- ting horsewhipped in the mud by buxom women in pink. Or so I am told.
It also works. Last weekend the animal rights movement taught Labour's Militant Tendency a trick or two. The National Trust must be far more impenetrable than the Labour Party. For a start the Trust has eight times more members. Its constitution is enshrined in statute and gives all power to its 52-member council and not to its 2.1 million members, most of whom join for the benefit of free entry to Trust proper- ties. The council is half nominated by con- servation groups, half elected by members. It has in the past been a tight-knit coterie. Membership meetings and ballots are advi- sory and not binding. Even Derek Hatton would find this a tough nut to crack.
Yet the League against Cruel Sports has cracked it. Rather than resign from the Trust, supporters were encouraged to join. Last week they won a postal and proxy vote by a 60 per cent majority of 214,000 Trust members. The majority was for a full ballot on a hunting ban as well as for an enquiry into animal cruelty. The cost of the special vote was L135,000. This was a remarkable coup for the New Politics of interest group activism.
The Trust council is in a difficult moral position, which is just where the entryists want it to be. While it can disregard the vote, no modern association likes to be thought unresponsive to public opinion. The Trust believes the silent majority of its members are not against hunting, though that is not the same as being strongly for it. In addition, much land was given to the Trust on the understanding that field sports would continue over it — notably the Exmoor estate of the Acland family which has been at the centre of the latest stag- hunting argument.
The Trust's chairman, Lord Chorley, has studiously adopted an agnostic position. Hunting, he says, should continue on Trust land as long as that is what Parliament per- mits. He and his council should not dictate to country people how they should or should not enjoy themselves if they are not breaking the law. Trust statutes also oblige them to honour the wishes of donors. This is fine in principle. Like Lord Chor- ley, I do not hunt and cannot imagine deriv- ing pleasure from such killing. But humans do far worse things to animals than burst their lungs in the chase or set dogs on them. Hunting brings money to the countryside, conserves its appearance and keeps the car- avan parks and golf courses at bay. People seem to enjoy it, and the Trust feels that those who work its land should be allowed their customary and lawful recreation.
Yet the Trust council is in a cleft stick by passing the buck to 'the law of the land'. Whenever anybody asks the Government for its view on hunting, it passes the buck straight back to landowners. I am glad it does so. I do not want ministers telling me how I may or may not enjoy my leisure time. They meddle enough as it is. Asking them to make difficult moral choices for landowners on the subject of hunting mere- ly encourages the instinct to meddle.
More to the point, the essence of the National Trust is to impose disciplines on its property well beyond the laissez-faire laws of Parliament. It is supposed to con- serve a traditional pattern of land use. From Swaledale and Fountains Abbey to the sweep of the Devon and Cornwall coastline, the Trust exists precisely to stop obnoxious development, even where it is lawful. The Trust regulates to keep ugliness at bay. It controls the slightest alteration to a building. It bans smoking on its proper- ties. It restricts motorbikes. Farm tenants must obey a hundred rules designed to save historic landscape. The National Trust is champion of conservationist intervention. It is proactive not reactive. So why this sud- den, timid deference to the 'will of Parlia- ment' over hunting?
The Trust's answer is that it supports hunting on its land because country people hunt, and country people are the occupants of Trust land. City-dwellers may equate hunting with bear-baiting and cock-fight- ing. As far as country people are con- cerned, such city-dwellers can stay at home, eat quiche and stroke the cat. The country- side is already under every kind of assault.
'Typical, 300 million of us all going for the same job.' Its conservation will get harder, not easier, as farm price support disappears. With agri-business giving way to agri-leisure, the traditional sports of rural Britain need sup- port not outlawing. A landscape of fields, hedges, hangers and covers is protected by the huntsman. It is destroyed by the camper and the golfer.
This is a fine argtunent for a lobbyist and one that I personally find convincing. I would vote to let others hunt if they wish. But the Trust is a body embracing 2 million living and breathing members — much as its council might wish otherwise. Its charac- ter and outlook must reflect their views. They may not all have aniseed hidden in their anoraks, but a dwindling number rep- resent the hunting squire and his tenant, Farmer Giles. Most members are subur- banites who visit the country by car and on foot, who love trees, birds and animals and who find the hysteria of the chase, if not obscene, at least unnervingly primitive. The League and its allies have found this group a soft target for their emotive campaign.
I do not see how the Trust's council can withstand the logic of democracy. Some last-ditchers would like the terms of its statute changed to make entryism harder and save it from frequent /100,000 ballots on hunting. But any alteration in the Trust's Act of Parliament would open Pandora's box. Parliament could hardly make a body as big as the Trust less democratic — possi- bly the reverse. Instead, the council will pre- sumably have to fight entryism as did the Labour moderates, by organising the silent majority to rise up against the League and its tactics. That would mean the council coming out unequivocally for hunting, on whatever grounds it dares. But how would the silent majority react to that? It might disagree. It might even turn hunt saboteur.
Democracy is a damned nuisance. Mem- bers are trouble, but in the case of the National Trust they are trouble plus £40 million a year. There's the rub. Conserva- tion is now a mass movement and a pros- perous one. That mass no longer lives in villages, shoots pigeons and runs with the hounds. It lives in towns. If made to run, it might prefer to do so with the hare, the fox and the stag. Such people save elephants, weep at wildlife videos and join the Nation- al Trust. When they vote, they al e used to being heard.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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