Country life
Moral dilemmas
Leanda de Lisle
Ifind myself taking the strangest mes- sages for Peter these days. 'The offal com- mittee meeting is taking place at Paul's house at 8 p.m.' was the last one. 'Waffle meeting?' I had asked the person on the other end of the telephone. 'No offal,' they replied. 'They waffle about offal.' I took the note and added, 'Meanwhile, I will be having champagne and canapes at the old Cabinet War Rooms.'
The offal committee is responsible for the hounds' diet, Peter explained later. This diet consists of what is called 'fallen stock'. To my horror I discovered it includes dead horses. (Poor Peter saw one without a head the other day. I don't think I'd ever have recovered.) But more usually the hunt collects livestock from farms. The service used to benefit both parties, but `Our northern branch has a property in your price range.' now that farmers find they can't afford to take their animals to a slaughter house hunts are being asked to kill and dispose of more and more animals.
If we were allowed to chase politicians for sport, hunting would become so popu- lar we'd be able to keep several more packs of hounds and perhaps make use of the blood and guts they have caused to pile up across the countryside. But, as it is, people like Peter have to work out how to cope with their mess, while I flee down to Lon- don to attend a debate on whether or not we should have gone to war in 1939, an event that preceded Sunday's Channel 4 documentary on the question.
I wasn't at all sure why I had been invit- ed to the debate, but I suspect it had some- thing to do with my saying that it wasn't in Britain's interest to go to war over Kosovo and therefore it was pure indulgence to do so. Now others were using the same argu- ment against our decision to go to war with Germany in 1939. Did I agree with them? No. German expansionism posed a threat to Britain in a way Serbian police action in Kosovo did not. But looking back it's clear that the Nazi menace didn't just threaten .our borders. It also threatened our moral core.
If we had stood by while Hitler con- quered Russia and wiped out the Jews, this country might have moved dramatically to the Right. The ruling class were quite anti- Semitic, terrified of socialism and saw the empire slipping away. If they had been the kind of people who would have allowed Hitler to dominate Europe, they might well have become the kind of people who would emulate him. Britain would then have become some spiritual colony of hell. Hap- pily, we remained the same nation that had taken a lead in abolishing the slave trade and had created our great parliamentary democracy. Not so happily our role in the second world war has been used to justify our recent war with Serbia. While it is entirely proper that we should despise Slobodan Milosevic, we should bear in mind that he did not attempt to wipe out Kosovan Alba- nians — at least until we started dropping bombs. Our moral core has, rather, been threatened by our own Prime Minister who has used our money to kill civilians who once fought alongside us, and our troops to rule a country where racist murders are permitted to occur every day. I was disappointed that, when Stephen Glover wrote about Kosovo, he didn't take the opportunity to ask why our newspaper editors haven't taken Tony Blair to task for doing so little to protect those Serbs who are now our responsibility. We'd never hear the end of it if he was caught with his boxer shorts down, in the arms of some harmless floozy. But it matters little that he's up to his waist in corpses and seems neither to know nor care if they be human or animal. It's simply left for us to wring our hands in dismay.
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