Appeasement has failed, but the battle for fox-hunting isn't over yet
PETER OBORNE
This is the weekend of the Grand National meeting, when Aintree racecourse hosts what remains emphatically the greatest horserace in the world. This year there will be extra entertainment: the rousing sight of a pack of hounds let loose on the course. It will be the first of a series of such manifestations at country shows and rural events throughout the summer — part of a campaign to defend a way of life left lethally exposed after last month's Commons vote to ban hunting. This 'summer of discontent' will culminate in a second countryside rally, most likely to be held in late September, in time to make maximum impact ahead of the Queen's Speech.
This programme of extra-parliamentary agitation represents a radical change of approach from the leadership of the Countryside Alliance. Ever since the great rally of four years ago established its existence, the organisation has worked alongside, not against, the government. It has moved forward on the basis of quiet meetings and private assurances from ministers and their advisers. The leadership of the Countryside Alliance has taken the mellow view that all problems are capable of being resolved when men of goodwill come together. It has worked along worldly and pragmatic lines. It has held back the 'hotheads' who wanted more direct and brutal action.
It now turns out that the Alliance leadership got it catastrophically wrong. Whether the Alliance was deliberately duped by Downing Street during those relaxed meetings between old chums is unclear. But beyond dispute is the fact that its trust in the good faith of the Prime Minister and his government was hopelessly misplaced.
This became woefully apparent in the week of 18 March. First, there was the matter of the vote itself. Both the Prime Minister and Alun Michael, the countryside minister, voted for a ban rather than the 'middle-way' option they privately claimed to countenance. Second, government spokesmen threatened to invoke the Parliament Act in the event of obstruction from the Lords — an unprecedented and even unconstitutional act of aggression.
If the week of 18 March was pivotal for the future of fox-hunting, it was decisive for the Countryside Alliance leadership. For weeks before the vote John Jackson and Richard Burge, chairman and chief executive of the Alliance, were warned that it was no longer realistic to deal with the government by negotiation. They rejected those warnings. The tone
of their daily emails to Alliance activists during those weeks — as an Alliance member I have been receiving these plaintive missives pretty well daily — recalls the famously complacent coverage of German foreign policy in the Times newspaper in the aftermath of Munich. With increasing desperation they insisted that all was well, that a deal was in the offing, and that everything was proceeding according to plan. They insisted that negotiation was the key and dismissed as naive those who wanted to demonstrate the power of rural sentiment by mobilising a major rally in Parliament Square on the day of the vote.
A week before the vote, pro-fox-hunting MPs met the Countryside Alliance leadership in Portcullis House. The mood was angry and mutinous, but Jackson — a top-class lawyer who chairs the betting group Ladbrokes — was adamant that everything was under control. He gave pitying replies to MPs who cautioned that the government would never be able to deliver on its promises. When Michael Ancram warned that the government might use the Parliament Act, Jackson contemptuously dismissed the suggestion.
The MPs in Portcullis House merely reflected the mood in their constituencies. It is impossible to exaggerate the fury against the Alliance leadership on the ground. A letter in last week's Horse and Hound from Bill Eastwood, honorary secretary of the Grove and Rufford hunt in Nottinghamshire, conveys the mood in rural areas: 'We are being asked to co-operate in drafting a Bill to ban hunting. It is beyond me why we should.' There is anecdotal evidence that members are starting to resign from the Alliance. The mood against Jackson was not improved when it emerged that he was in Australia throughout the week starting 18 March.
His strategy has collapsed, but it was a strategy that made a great deal of sense to begin with. Five years ago the most intelligent supporters of fox-hunting — men like Roddie Fleming, Peter Daresbury and Marcus Kimball, Master of the Wynnstay — made a clear-headed decision to engage in the political process. They were far from dismayed that the leading figures in the Alliance — Jackson, Burge and Baroness Mallalieu — were Labour supporters. They judged that the new leadership would have a far better chance of getting the message across than the inarticulate, red-faced backwoodsmen who up to that point had dominated the sport's inner councils.
Nor was that judgment misplaced. Public acceptance of the sport has risen during the last five years, and this is because the enlightened and sophisticated leadership largely won the argument. It won it in the rural affairs committee of the Scottish parliament, and with the Burns report in England. Arguments about fox-hunting's role in protecting the environment, generating jobs, exterminating vermin, picking up fallen stock and its importance in the rural economy — let alone the overwhelming case for personal liberty — have been accepted by most fair-minded people who have studied the subject. It is an important reason why so much of the liberal media is against a ban. Jackson, Burge and Mallalieu deserve most of the credit for this.
Yet the fox-hunting issue is ultimately not about reason, but about narrow class prejudice. The leadership of the Countryside Alliance has done a much better job than its detractors insist. But perhaps they are guilty of this: they are decent, well-meaning people who believe that matters of this kind should be decided by force of argument. They are like Neville Chamberlain before the second world war. Labour's threat to use the Parliament Act last month must have been as shocking to Jackson as Hitler's invasion of Poland was to Chamberlain in 1939. It is nevertheless worth bearing in mind that even today scholarly opinion on appeasement is divided, and many argue that it gave Britain a better chance of winning the war when it finally came.
The government is now offering fox-hunting yet another six-month 'consultation period'. It would be absurd to take this at face value. The Alliance has won the arguments, thanks to John Jackson and others, and they have been repeatedly ignored. Now it is time to progress to a war footing. In the end the survival of fox-hunting comes down to weight of muscle. Is Tony Blair more afraid of his backbenchers, or is he more terrified of rural Britain? The job of the Alliance now is to ensure that he hears the blood-curdling battle-cry of the countryside.
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