Peter Viney's Blog

This article was prompted by reading Charlotte Ivers in the Sunday Times:

So they’re going to ban Trail Hunting by hounds. Do I care? I always agreed with Oscar Wilde that traditional fox hunting was the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable. The blooding rituals were obscene.

Hunting for food is legitimate, as old as humanity. Older. As old as carnivorous primates. Stag and deer hunting? Nasty, but at least they ate the venison. They eat grouse and pheasant.  Hunting foxes for fun? Deeply unpleasant. It’s also a thing of the past. But let us explore.

I like to see the urban fox. Several wander freely around our garden. At our previous house we backed onto a railway cutting, and we watched a family of foxes every year who had their den halfway up the cutting on the other side. The cubs gambolled on a sandy ledge of land. They are really sweet. Repeat urban fox. However, I really don’t agree with people who feed them. That’s misguided. They’re not pets, they’re wild animals. Don’t Disneyfy them. Don’t make them into dependents on you. That’s your emotional problem, not the foxes. They’re useful inhabitants of the town, keeping down mice, rats and slugs. They take several pigeons a year and leave feathers on our lawn, but then pigeons eat our wisteria.  I’ve never seen a fox attack a cat (an urban myth), but I have seen a cat attack a fox head on and it ran away. OK, foxes shit on the lawn. I live with it.

Foxes in the country are a different matter. Rural foxes. Chicken farmers or just people who keep a few hens hate them. You can stop them getting in a chicken run, but when they sniff around the fence, the terror stops chickens laying or they even die of fear. A fox doesn’t hunt to eat a chicken. If it gets in, it invariably kills every chicken in the run. That’s what foxes do. A fox will wipe out twenty hens in short order.

So on to the legislation. Labour are the party of the urban working class. They might have gained anti-Tory seats in the country last time, but they know they won’t retain them, and couldn’t give a shit about farmers, farming, rural areas or rural traditions. OK, they’ll walk through Tolpuddle once a year, but that’s just a jolly. An outing with a pint in the pub. The legislation is all about politics, not about animal welfare.

Tony Blair used the 2004 ban on fox hunting to get votes from the urban animal loving “fur baby “ brigade. We had Conservative and Lib Dem neighbours and friends who switched and voted Labour just because of the proposed fox hunting ban. Blair understood the way to power was from a central position. Yes, you appoint a left wing, or rather trades union, deputy, in his case Prescott, to blunder about, but you don’t pander to the extreme left. My opinion on Blair is strong. If post war British PMs are to enter Dante’s circles of hell, Blair’s place is in the deepest level of any of them. The lies to parliament, cabinet and country on weapons of mass destruction killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq if not millions. Estimates range 100,000 to 1,000,000. The repercussions since are even worse. Then there was the irony of him being appointed Peace Envoy to the Middle East that he had fractured. However, domestically, Blair knew what he was doing. He steered the ship of state tolerably well.

So Keir Starmer, currently unpopular, has studied Tony Blair, a cleverer and more charismatic man than him, though I judge a far worse human being than Starmer. Starmer’s main fault is being dull and indecisive. So the recent ruse of stopping trail hunting is to get those fur baby votes, and to appease the spiteful “anti-toff” element of his party. Ms Ivers describes it as ‘Class War.’ She is exactly right. In the country it’s seen as an additional attack to the inheritance tax on family farms. They’ve rolled that back a bit, which will lose the revenue £130 million. That’s an irrelevant sum in terms of the budget. I also think that unlike fox hunting twenty odd years ago, trail hunting really isn’t a big issue for the population as a whole. I don’t think it will garner the votes he hoped. In 2004 hunt saboteurs were news. There’d always be scenes of a red-faced thug in hunting jacket thrashing some poor protestor with a riding crop. Not now. When we got married in Poole Registry Office back in the late 70s, a fox hunting painting behind the registrar had been slashed side to side. Feelings ran strongly. No one really cares about a cloth drenched in fox piss being dragged about.

Labour think their class war is against a perceived rural upper middle class of wealthy landowners, but it’s not that. It’s about all rural people, a group who have never owned a political party. It’s in our roots. Karen’s family were rural Gloucestershire and rural Wiltshire. My history is more complex. My grandad was born rural poor, a family of gardeners in a tied cottage on the Cranborne Estate in North Dorset for centuries. At age twelve he said he wasn’t tugging his forelock any more to the lords and ladies (he was an ornery bloke, much like myself). He set off on the cart to Wimborne. Became a railway porter, then an engine cleaner, then a fireman, then an engine driver. He hauled himself from rural poor to skilled working class. He knew that life as urban working class was more pleasant.

Class war by Labour? Class spite. Vindictiveness. Yes, the VAT on private schools was sheer spite. It’s apparently followed by the Royal Shakespeare Company who decided to charge private school parties more (or rather not discount them). Then they complained about empty seats as a result. The economics of spite don’t work. The mansion tax was also sheer spite. So you raise VAT from 20% to 21% you have 17 billion. You raise it by 2% you have 34 billion. 2.5% would work better, which would be 42.5 billion. 22.5% VAT would then be in line with most of Europe. So the mansion tax (for example) will raise at best 400 million, or about 1% of that, and not till 2028. It’s virtue signalling, not good economics. It will fall largely on the South-East. It won’t fill in any black hole (a hole which turns out to be, well, a fib.)

Neither of those moves raise much money, they will  cost a fortune to administer, but they appease the vindictive elements of his party. Labour currently really is presenting as the spiteful party. Starmer doesn’t need to pander to that Corbynista element – Blair didn’t – and shouldn’t be trying to.

Given the state of the country, are there more pressing matters than trail hunting, or the added banning lobster thermidor? I wouldn’t eat a lobster which had been boiled alive, nor would I boil one, but people have been doing it for centuries. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it. I loathe creme fraiche and I have avoided beef since BSE, but I have no objection to you eating either. Over the last week I read that 25% of 16-24 year olds are neither in full time education nor employment. Retail and hospitality industries complain they are being crippled by NI and minimum wage changes. Pubs and restaurants have been putting up signs saying NO LABOUR MPs. You can only pay the minimum wage if the employee produces enough income for the business to justify it. But then the majority of Labour MPs are ex-state or local government employees (including education and the NHS). They don’t understand that. Eliminating a younger age range for minimum wage will exacerbate youth unemployment. Then there’s immigration. The majority of people know that regulated immigration is a great benefit to us. However, the vast majority resent young aggressive male “invaders” on small boats. Aggressive? If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have got that far. Then just think about the Russian ships mapping our underwater supply chains. And amidst all this, we are devoting precious parliamentary time to trail hunting?

Whole communities revolve around the local hunt and its annual events. Government is not about changing the behaviour of communities. The rural population would say it’s none of the urban population’s business. Step out. Fuck off, townies.  

We spoke to people at a village open gardens day in Dorset. Chickens ran around freely everywhere. Ducks waddled to ponds.  An idyllic scene. I asked, so what about foxes? Answer: We shoot them. If they stopped us shooting them, we’d trap them. If they stopped us trapping them, we’d poison them. Whatever, foxes will die. We cannot afford foxes.

These country people quite liked trail hunting, as a real fox might run through a garden or small holding followed by a pack of hounds and horsemen, wreaking havoc and destroying food crops. The trail hunt didn’t do that, though admittedly, sometimes a live fox got in the way and the hounds followed. They also said the hunts traditionally protected foxes to the point of virtually breeding them, so as to have foxes to hunt. The chicken and geese and duck owners didn’t want foxes at all. They certainly didn’t want hunts virtually rearing the predators. But trail hunting kept people employed. People flocked to events like Boxing Day hunts. Local pubs had their best day of the year.

So animal lovers, what will happen to the foxhounds after the ban? They won’t go into petting zoos. They’ve been raised in packs. 170 packs in England. They won’t go out to be re-homed as pets. Do you know what will happen to foxhounds, which are expensive to feed? They will be put down. Killed. The foxes will continue to be shot. Is it more humane? The chicken farmers are not necessarily crack shots. They must often wound rather than kill. A few years ago we watched an urban fox staggering around our garden in clear severe distress. We called the RSPCA but it was dead by the time they got here. Poisoned, they said. Some bastard had put out poisoned meat. You wouldn’t wish that on any creature.

Don’t be confused by fiction, by Disneyfication. A rural fox wants to be red in tooth and claw.

People who look after horses and hounds will be out of work. But urban fur baby lover, you might have saved the odd Fantastic Mr Fox. Destroy a way of life in doing so. So what? They’re just peasants. Read the books. Fantasise about Roald Dahl’s talking foxes and their little ones. But keep your ignorant urban noses out of the countryside.