There's more at stake than the fox

WHEN I was 18, like many English schoolboys of the period, I volunteered to work in a kibbutz. It was a secular kibbutz, but in order to conform with Israeli food regulations, the slaughter of the chickens had to be performed according to the Book of Leviticus. I shall never forget the arrival of the ritual slaughterer in that chicken house. To my gentile eyes, the old man looked like the prophet Samuel, with a long white beard. There were a lot of chickens to kill, and the kosher method of slaughter requires that the blood of the beast be shaken out of it.

Oh, what squawking and spattering of blood ensued. It gave you some insight into what it must have been like in the Herodian Temple at Jerusalem when thousands of birds and sheep were being killed and their blood scattered on the altars. If I had not been a vegetarian before the experience, I should certainly have been one after it.

If sadistic hoodlums standing in the middle of Oxford Street treated a chicken as that old rabbi treated them, they would undoubtedly be arrested.

Earnest discussions on Radio 4's Moral Maze programme would ask whether society, parents or video nasties were to blame. My intolerant Tolstoyan vegetarian teenage self would probably have said that I wanted a ban on kosher slaughter, on Halal methods of butchery, on hunting, shooting and fishing, and on most forms of horse racing.

Certainly last year's Grand National left us in no doubt that horses suffer during a steeple chase as tough as that.

YET, as John Mortimer and others remind us in a letter in yesterday's Times: "Hunting will always be a controversial activity, and the signatories to this letter do not necessarily condone it.

But we share the belief that a fundamental question of civil liberty is at issue, and that to criminalise an activity which has the support of so many law-abiding citizens would constitute a radical and undesirable break with the liberal tradition of lawmaking in this country."

This is the fundamental point at issue in the hunting debate. And this is why the Labour supporters of the hunt, in particular - such as John Mortimer QC or Ann Mallalieu - are fighting for something much more serious than the fate of foxes, or even the livelihood of those who might be put out of a job if the hunting ban goes through. It is a principle of English life, which the Labour Party should endorse and enshrine.

Namely, that we should live and let live, and that minorities within our midst should wherever possible be allowed to entertain views, or follow customs which to the majority might seem very peculiar.

That is what a liberal and tolerant society is.

John Prescott's scarcely rational contribution to the debate on hunting was to say that you only had to look at the faces of those who hunt to want it instantly banned. Libertarians could return the compliment by looking at the faces of Mr Blair and many of his supporters. They are not faces "contorted with hate", as Mr Prescott believed to be true of the hunting fraternity.

But there is a gleam to those faces which reminds those of us who have been religious of those Christians who believe themselves to be saved, set apart by the Almighty for special work. The smiles are the smiles of those who know themselves to be right, and who, by definition, also know everyone else to be wrong.

They are the gleaming smiles of those who want to improve other people, tidy them up, scrub their necks and ears.

There has always been a nannyish side to the Labour Party. But the party's soul in the old days was not dominated by its nannyishness.

What defined it was a zeal for fairness, decency and equality which drove on the great reformers, from Keir Hardie and the Webbs, to Attlee and the setters up of the welfare state to the weird alliance in the 1960s and 1970s between trades union barons and failed dons which constituted the Wilson era.

English socialism was based on the concept of Christian humanism. The point of the political programme was not a Robe-spierrean desire to make us all conform, but a benign desire to enable less well-off people to have opportunities denied them by economic circumstances: decent hospitals, schools and work conditions.

To personalise the argument yet further: does it not speak volumes that the most conspicuous Tory hater of the hunt is Ann Widdecombe?

THE anti-hunt legislation is an anti-people legislation.

It tries to say that the strongly held views of a certain kindly minded majority should force country people to abandon customs and practices which they have pursued time out of mind.

The countryside itself, with its hedges, covers and fields, has been shaped by country sports - nearly all of which, as a squeamish and ignorant townie, I would hate to pursue.

Some will say these arguments would allow cockfighting and bear- baiting as legitimate minority activities. The Burns inquiry has already answered this objection. It seems perfectly proper in a decent society that we should have laws which prevent unnecessary cruelty to animals. Such laws already exist, and, for those who care about such things passionately, perhaps they should be further refined, but Burns concluded that hunting a fox with hounds is a reasonably swift and painless way of killing a countryside menace.

A society which conducted itself on the intolerant lines advocated by the anti-hunt brigade might be very nice for foxes but would not necessarily be so nice for people. It isn't a cheap jibe to remind ourselves that the only European leader who has previously succeeded in banning foxhunting is that sentimentalist animal-lover Adolf Hitler. When Goering once brought a lobster to the table, the Fuhrer was so outraged he screamed that he would like to ban the eating of lobsters too. No doubt many Blairite MPs would like to protect lobsters. But the law exists to protect the broad liberties of people, not the particular fads of the intolerant.

Because we so passionately believe in the religious liberties of Muslims and Jews, our society protects their right to slaughter animals in ways which would, if we watched them, revolt us. Exactly the same argument applies in the secular hunting field. By banning the hunt, our Government of smiling lay preachers chips away at the most precious quality in English public life: our institutionalised tolerance.

Copyright 2000
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