L ast week our local hunt met at a subscriber’s farm.
Because it was a weekday, the mounted field was small — half a dozen or so. As soon as they moved off, they were pursued by 31 masked men, many of them carrying fence posts. When three of the field rode up to them to tell them to leave the private land, some raised the posts above their heads, two-handed, and tried to bring them down with full force on a horse’s face. The rider, a woman aged 60, turned so that she, not her horse, took the force of the blows, and the happy sideeffect was that the horse floored one of the gang with both hooves. The main body of the antis then caught up with a 30-year-old farmer’s son on a quad bike. They pulled him off it, smashed it up and attacked him with staves, bricks and concrete blocks, breaking his skull in three places. A whipperin who galloped up to help him was also beaten up, suffering separated ribs and bruised kidneys. They only stopped beating the farmer’s son when someone shouted that the police were coming. To evade the police, the antis ran towards their vehicles, and most of them got away. ‘The police’, at this stage, turned out to be a solitary traffic policeman. One Land-Rover drove straight and fast at him as if to run him over, but he stood his ground to the last moment and then smashed both windscreen and driver’s window with his truncheon, forcing it to stop. Helped by the lady Master, who was on foot, and one foot-follower, the policeman managed to hold the seven antis from the vehicle, handcuffing two of the most aggressive, until reinforcements arrived. Arrests were made and charges have followed. Three things stand out. The first is the courage of the members of the hunt, who were heavily outnumbered and not, of course, armed. The second is the bravery of the lone policeman, and the efficiency of his colleagues who soon joined him. (It was not ever thus.) The third is the perfect madness of the antis since the ban. The meet which they attacked was one in which a legal trail was laid, as the hunt offered to show them. They were therefore disrupting, with extreme violence, an activity of which they do not disapprove. As shown by the fightback in favour of animal experiments at Oxford University this week, people are at last realising that the antipathy of the terrorists is beyond reason, and so has to be resisted absolutely.
Recently, I received a letter from Sir Max Hastings. This was not a first for me. Max is an old friend and was once my editor. I treasure dashed-off cards of thanks and congratulation from him, as well as amazing memos when he decided not to let the sun go down on his wrath. This letter was different. Max was sending it to thousands of people inciting us to join the Campaign to Protect Rural England, of which he is the president. The recipient is offered various choices, e.g., do you want ‘A babbling stream winding among the bluebells in a wood’ or ‘A stream of cars to new executive homes half a mile away’? Once you have decided, you are encouraged to fill in a card headed ‘Dear Sir Max, Here’s my view’ and to send it back to him with a regular payment of £2 per month. I shan’t be doing this, I’m afraid, because although, as a Nimby, it is against my apparent interest, I believe that the CPRE is wrong. The attempt to stop further house-building in rural areas will kill — is already killing — much of the life of the countryside and is unfair to the poor and the young. Those of us who already live in the country presumably do not think our own homes desecrate it, yet we see all new homes as a desecration. Under our present planning system, new building often is horrible, but that is partly because of planning restrictions. In a culture in which people always object to space being used and in which the highest compliment to a new development is ‘It’s not too bad: you can’t really see it’, it is not surprising that only miserable little boxes get put up. Given the vast demand (visible in the price) for rural housing, the answer must lie in embracing it, allowing local communities to benefit from it, and having the confidence to try to make it beautiful. Read all about this in a brilliant new pamphlet from Policy Exchange (of which I am chairman) called Better Homes, Greener Cities.
This week I found myself doing something I have not done since the early 1980s — buying a shirt with stripes in it. I don’t much like stripy shirts, so I suspect that I was responding instinctively to a change of fashion and a change of culture in which conservative icons are once again permitted. Next, wing collars with dinner jackets?
Tony Blair’s much-disputed education reforms want to ‘put parents in the driving seat’. The metaphor is interesting. As anyone who has ever done the school run knows, parents ferrying their children are not very happy in the driving seat. They are harassed by lateness, or parking problems, or books/clothes forgotten, or noise in the back. As a result, they may not always drive very well. Mr Blair is right to want to give parents more choice, but education would not be better if parents drove it. The correct metaphor, surely, is that each head teacher is the driver and should be free to find the right way. The parent’s power should consist of being able to decide whether his or her child travels with that particular head at all, not to grab the steering wheel.
The Power Inquiry’s recommendation that the voting age should be reduced to 16 is a good example of cultural intimidation. It is now a sacred tenet that young people have a great deal to teach us, so when the votes-at-16 suggestion is made politicians have to nod their heads and ‘look at it very seriously’. In fact, though, there is not one single good reason why 16-year-olds should have the vote. Virtually none of them pays taxes, looks after anyone, does a job or serves the public. They are quite delightful, of course (I speak as the father of two children about to be 16), but so what? People who are desperate to vote at 16 are like people who are desperate to marry at 16: we should smile indulgently at their ardour, and make sure that they cannot act upon it. Voting will only be more highly valued if it takes longer to attain — perhaps the age should return to 21, or even 40.
Whenever a politician starts saying that something should be ‘fit for purpose’, don’t listen to another word he says.
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