T he United Nations declared last week that, for the first
time in human history, more people in the world live in the town than in the country. If true, this feels momentous, though it is not, obviously, sudden. The imagination of mankind has been shaped by rural life more than by anything else, but this has been fading for 200 years in the West, and now is fading almost everywhere. What are its effects? A crisis for the great religions, whose language of elemental truth assumes an understanding of what it is to be a good shepherd, to sow and reap, to have murrains of cattle and crops that fail. But also, one would hope, a deeper acceptance that the life of the city is what we all have to work on if society is to prosper. In a barn on the farm where I was brought up, a wooden yoke hung on a peg. I used to imagine the very last evening the labourer left it there after carrying the milk pails to the farmhouse, and feel sad. But then I never had to bear the yoke myself. It is not an accident that words like ‘civilisation’ and ‘politics’ refer to life in cities. In cities, we have grown freer: we need to love them better.
It is three years this week that the hunting ban came ‘into force’, though that phrase, I am glad to say, has proved highly inappropriate. The Conservative party, however, seems to be avoiding requests to reiterate its commitment to allow a free vote, in government time, in the first session of Parliament, on repeal. The Tories are casting about for a way of changing the law through secondary legislation: they could, for example, alter the definition of ‘exempt hunting’ to allow a far larger number of hounds than the current maximum — though even this is permitted only for flushing onto guns — of two. One can see why the leadership worries about getting snarled up in this matter, but the route of secondary legislation would send the party on what in hunting is called a ‘heel line’ — chasing a scent backwards. It would plunge Parliament into interminable technical arguments and it would be essentially dishonest, because it would leave the ban in force while trying to neuter it, thus annoying everyone. The existing commitment is simpler and easier to justify than any other. The Conservatives have taken their stand on the issue of freedom and the need for laws to be practical. If they make the promise of immediate repeal in the next manifesto, as they did in the last, they will be clear and consistent, they will impel the Lords, under the Salisbury Convention which defers to manifestoes, to assist, and they will maintain the loyalty of the hunting people who, in most of their target seats, do the crucial campaigning work. Kill the On Tuesday night, Daniel Hannan MEP was expelled from the federalist European People’s Party — which includes the Tories as uneasy bedfellows — accused of wanting a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and of calling the Speaker of the European Parliament a Nazi. What Hannan actually said was that the Speaker was ‘a decent and democratic man’, but that his decision to ignore the Parliament’s own rules to prevent further protest against the failure to hold a referendum called to mind the Enabling Act in the Reichstag in 1933. Funnily enough, before Hannan had delivered his wicked remark, two group leaders made speeches comparing the pro-referendum protestors’ interventions to the tactics of Adolf Hitler and/ or Nazi members of the Reichstag. Neither was disciplined, of course. Anyway, Hannan is now a happy man, since he has fulfilled his party’s promise to break with the EPP. That promise was made by David Cameron, and there are signs that he is belatedly moving towards fulfilling it. Within 18 months, one suspects, Hannan will not be sitting alone.
One of the melancholy things about being a journalist is the awareness that everything one does is forgotten. But there are one or two of our trade who are so distinctive that they are exempt from the rule. Auberon Waugh is top of this small class. Whenever something grotesque or horrible or pharisaical happens — i.e. every single day — I find myself wishing that Bron were here to comment on it. What would he have said, for example, about the latest shootings of fellow students in the United States (on this occasion, at Northern Illinois University)? Most of us (see previous Notes) drone on about ‘America’s love affair with the gun’. Bron, I feel, would have preferred to ask what it is about American higher education which drives people to homicide.
Not that the British version is better. When I was a student, one used to bump into American contemporaries who would say things like, ‘Oh yes, we have done Thomas Hardy [or whoever]’. This would turn out to mean that they had read short set passages from one or two of Hardy’s novels and then answered a few ‘multiple choice’ questions about them. They had never read the whole book. At the time, we looked down our noses at this form of study, but today it seems commonplace in Britain (except that Hardy is probably too long dead and too indisputably white and male even to merit extracts). The latest news is that oral examinations in foreign languages are to be dropped from GCSE because they are ‘too stressful’. Why is it that a society which fills its public rhetoric with the importance of education has developed such a hatred of actually learning anything? No — as Bron Waugh might have said — I am not suggesting we should shoot all those involved, but the thought is somehow consoling.
T.E. Utley is another journalist whose influence extends far beyond his life. Because of the second-to-last-ditch reluctance of Lord Hartwell’s Daily Telegraph to give anyone a column, Peter (as he was always called) was not as well known to the public as Auberon Waugh, but he had a huge effect through his Telegraph leading articles, and through his conversation and friendship with the young. Peter Utley was blind and liked sitting in the pub, and his was the special sort of wisdom which immobility and not being in a hurry can bring. He had a Dr Johnson Toryism — Anglican, funny, wholly English, independent — but without any of Johnson’s awkwardness. His company was an education — the more so because it never presented itself as such. When Peter died 20 years ago, a fund was set up in his memory, and this year it offers a prize of £5,000, open to undergraduates at any British university who submit an essay of not more than 5,000 words on ‘Will the United Kingdom still be united in ten years’ time? And should it?’ The judges include Michael Gove MP, Tom Utley of the Daily Mail (yes, son of T.E.), Andrew Gimson of the Daily Telegraph and myself. Entries should be sent to the T.E. Utley Memorial Fund, 111 Sugden Road, London SW11 5ED, or emailed to ginda. utley@btinternet.com by Friday 16 May.
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