Radio
True Labour, new bans
Michael Vestey
Listening to the oleaginously unpleas- ant Dr Jack Cunningham on Today last Fri- day, I heard the true voice of Labour: the bullying, blinkered, intransigent Labour we knew of old. In opposition, Tony Blair suc- ceeded in masking this tendency with his pretty smile and amiable manner but in power it is proving more difficult. True Labour rather than New Labour is Coming Out. Cunningham followed an interview with a Hampshire butcher who defiantly told the programme that he was continuing to sell meat on the bone and oxtails. His customers demanded it.
Cunningham said darkly that butchers shouldn't boast about this as there were local authority inspectors who would go in and enforce the law, and he understood that this particular butcher had been warned. Listening to his menacing com- ments I wondered when we'll see mass civil disobedience in the countryside. The coun- tryside rallies in London are only the start. How long will it be before MI5 is ordered to establish a Barbour squad to infiltrate dissident country folk? To bug their labradors and to infiltrate the Young Farmers Ball?
True Labour has been active in Bradford where the metropolitan district council has decided to ban grouse shooting on Ilkley Moor. Fortunately, Ilkley is the only municipal grouse moor in the country, a fact I learned from Scenes From Provincial Life on Radio Four the week before last (Thursday). It was the second of a three- part series where novelists report from their home patches. For this particular pro- gramme, the producers Joy Hatwood and Joanna Rahim allowed the novelist Martyr Bedford to examine the dispute between the city and the country people of Ilkley.
In one sense Bedford was an appropriate choice in that he's the author of Acts of Revision, a novel about revenge, and it is clearly some sort of class revenge that has made the Labour councillors of Bradford end grouse shooting. In another sense, Bedford was not quite right for this task as he admitted towards the end of the pro- gramme that he was a vegetarian who knew nothing about shooting and would rather watch football. Although he now lived in Ilkley he was brought up in Croydon. Despite this unpromising admission he broadly remained fair though one detected where his sympathies lay. I don't know much about grouse or pheasant shooting, either, though I'm sur- rounded where I live by shoots. I like hear- ing the guns blasting on a misty, wintry Saturday morning and observing the tweedy, brown-faced beaters patrolling the local roads in search of errant pheasants. The birds aren't completely stupid as they form an escape committee in my garden until the guns are silent. I don't hunt but when I see the hunters' pink, green and black coats and liver-spotted hounds eager- ly bounding ahead it raises my spirits. It subconsciously reminds me that I am in England and is as reassuring to me as the sight of a black cab or a double-decker bus might be to those who prefer to live in the City.
What came through Bedford's pro- gramme was the pinch-brained puritanism of Labour councillors, their intolerance and their spite. The prime mover in the banning of grouse shooting was Councillor Jack Womersley, a fireman. `I personally don't like shooting,' he said. 'I find it offen- sive.' That is, of course, a perfectly valid Point of view. I find Womersley offensive but I wouldn't ban him; at least not yet. That's not all he dislikes. `I'm not a great one for the pigeons,' he told Bedford. would bring in a bye-law to prosecute peo- ple who feed pigeons.' True Labour: ban this, ban that.
It seems that those who live in the mar- ket town of Ilkley are posh in that they vote Conservative but they're governed by Labour Bradford. It was obvious to me that class hatred was behind the move but the official reason was that walkers should be given precedence over shooters. The fact that they have happily co-existed for years with Bradford even making £8,000 a year from shooting parties on the moor was irrelevant. As were the environmental con- sequences of a ban. A local landowner said the moor would be over-grazed by sheep destroying the heather, leaving just bracken and coarse grass. ,Were it not for the shoot- ing there would be no grouse or, for that matter, other wildlife.
When the moor first came under the control of the council some years ago the gamekeeper was made redundant. I found his broad Yorkshire accent difficult to fol- low but his wife was clearer. She said of the Labour councillors, `They're ignorant but they don't realise that, do they? It's not their fault.' I though she was being rather too charitable. One might say the same of the Minister of Agriculture when he made the selling of beef on the bone a criminal offence but it seems to me to be very much his fault. This was an interesting pro- gramme, well made and atmospheric; there were times when you felt you were actually on the moor. Ultimately, though, the small- mindedness of this particular scene from provincial life was depressing to hear.
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