AS I WAS SAYING
The divine right of votes which threatens our freedoms
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
It says a lot about Britain's political arrangements that most of us go through life without having to doubt that we are liv- ing in a free society. Certainly that has been my good fortune to date. No government so far throughout my 73 years has forced me to do anything, or prevented me forcibly from doing anything, entirely against my will. This is not to say that everything the state has ordered me to do was exactly what I would have done on my own accord. It was not in accordance with my will, for example, to pay some 60 to 70 per cent of my by no means considerable income to Harold Wilson's Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wanted to hear my pips squeak. And had I been able to impose my will, instead of having the state's imposed on me, quite a number of other laws of the land would have been either strengthened or weakened. Even so I went along with them voluntarily. True, I would have been compelled to do so if I hadn't, but I didn't feel under duress or in any real sense unfree.
Even during the war, when our freedoms had been suspended for the duration, I do not recall feeling one jot less free than when they had been in full peacetime oper- ation. Not waiting to be conscripted, I vol- untarily joined up. In other words, my will and the state's coincided. So it was with pretty well the entire population, and even the conscientious objectors were not forced to fight against their will. It could be objected, of course, that I would be writing somewhat differently had I not had the good fortune to be born in what used to be called the ruling class, and there is some truth in this. I imagine the picketing miners being charged by Mrs Thatcher's mounted police, for example, did feel somewhat coerced. Certainly the closure of the coal mines was not in accor- dance with their will, but their right to keep the pits open was not exactly an ancient right, or indeed a right at all. What they were about, therefore, was not so much the protection of an old freedom as the asser- tion of a new one — in effect a bid for trade union hegemony. That the bid failed must indeed have been profoundly frustrat- ing, but I rather doubt if at the end of the day Mr Scargill and his militant miners felt any the less free.
In any case, by Mr Scargill's Marxist lights, the capitalist state was simply behav- ing as capitalist states have always behaved; as they are programmed to behave. Noth- ing new or shocking about that, only a con- tinuation of a tradition going back far into the mists of time. It was the militant min- ers, therefore, who were trying to coerce the government, quite as much as the gov- ernment trying to coerce the militant min- ers. Freedom was not the issue; power was the issue, and this was realised by both sides. If the militant miners had won, the working class would have become much more powerful, but by losing it did not become much less free, any more than the coal owners felt much less free in 1945 when the pits were nationalised by a Labour government. Such ups and downs in the class war have long been part of the customary democratic process, with the owners expecting to be better off under Conservative governments and the unions better off under Labour governments. This was legitimate majority rule, not illegiti- mate majority tyranny, and accepted as such by both sides.
This is what should worry us deeply about the possibility of a ban on fox-hunt- ing: that such a ban would not be an act of legitimate majority rule, in the Whiggish tradition, but rather an act of illegitimate majority tyranny in the Jacobinical tradi- tion. By this I don't mean that it would be illegal or unconstitutional, since in this country — unlike in the United States — a House of Commons majority has the right, equivalent to the divine right of kings, to do whatever it wants. But what has always pre- vented this absolute power deteriorating into tyranny has been a voluntary restraint on the part of Parliament not lightly to bully minorities; not to bring down upon their heads the full majesty of the law for no better reason than some majority aspira- tion of the hour.
Absolute monarchs often acted on whim like Greek gods; for example, James I once stopped anybody but himself from hunting near Edinburgh. But that is why, in 1688, the Stuarts were got rid of, to be replaced gradually by a superior form of absolutism which, it was hoped, could be relied upon to use the law more wisely. On the whole these hopes have been fulfilled. Certainly the rights of minorities have often been overridden, as homosexuals, for example, know to their cost. But homosexuality was something expressly forbidden by the state religion, Christianity, and at a time when population increase was a great national concern, could plainly be said to have anti- social consequences.
In an ancient society such as ours, law should reflect a partnership between dying beliefs, beliefs of the day and beliefs that are about to surface. Possibly fox-hunting is a dying belief, although the 120,000 who gathered last month in Hyde Park did not seem to lack vitality. Even so, public opin- ion does seem to be shifting rapidly on the subject of animal rights in general. But the new position to which it is shifting is still utterly obscure. The churches are agnostic on this subject, as well they might be since it is not very long ago since clergymen rode to hounds as enthusiastically, and with as clear a conscience, as any layman. Nor have the philosophers pronounced. I know of no formidable galaxy of academic opinion in favour of a ban on fox-hunting comparable to that which had built up before a ban was imposed on capital punishment.
Both the journals of informed opinion which are usually in the vanguard of all progressive causes — the Guardian and the Independent — are against the ban on fox-hunting. Scientific opinion, too, sounds an almost laughably uncertain note. Ani- mals, the scientists say, experience fear and pain as a result of being hunted — a truly blinding glimpse of the irrelevantly obvi- ous. Cattle can certainly suffer pain and fear in the abattoir, but that is not enough to persuade Parliament to deny us the age- old pleasure of eating roast beef. Confu- sion reigns on the subject of animal rights. After one good film about a sweet little pig, sales of pork dropped dramatically but were very soon back to normal. Similar shifts could take place in the way public opinion regards fox-hunting if the Walt Disney studios decided to turn Mr Jor- rocks and his fox-hounds into a box-office hit.
Under these circumstances there can be no justification for bringing the full majesty of the law down upon the heads of a sec- tion of society which by no stretch of the imagination can be said to threaten the security of the state or public morals and, until the day before yesterday, was smiled upon by church and state. Even so, this piece of demagogic tyranny will go through unless the government stops it, which is by no means certain. What does this tell us about our new masters? That they are unfit to govern a free society. Perhaps they will soon learn. But who is to teach them?
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