Ban extremism from the countryside

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It's become a commonplace of Blairite Britain that there isn't really any opposition to New Labour. If we persist in expecting opposition to be synonymous with Her Majesty's opposition in the Commons, then it's true: it's a mangy beast these days and it squeaks, rather than roars its dissent. But opposition needn't come with a headquarters in London SW1 - nor need it be a party in the traditional sense at all.

The lifeblood of resistance, the fire and the channels of anger are draining away from the political parties. First the fuel protests, now the Countryside Alliance have supplanted the Conservatives as the place to be to show that you don't like the Government.

I was struck this week by the expectant buzz around the Countryside March this Sunday - the potent combination of mass movement with frantic social preparations for dinners, parties and the idea that the March is the right thing to be associated with, morally, politically, socially. It felt, in other words, very much like an alternative political party on a roll.

The Alliance's strength is that it attracts so many different people who feel unhappy about many different things. At the root, though, was Tony Blair's carelessly proposed hunting ban which fired up his own party's appetite for ritual slaughter of its ancestral enemies - toffs on horses.

The Burns report on hunting, commissioned by Mr Blair, needs defending. It was a sound, moderate and wellresearched piece of work. Societies should change in their assessment of what pain caused to animals in the name of sport is acceptable. Lord Burns duly pointed up the more controversial aspects of hunting - especially the trauma caused by the diggingout of the fox.

Had Mr Blair not been hamstrung by his own election pledge to ban hunting, he could have used the report to seek a voluntary code of conduct on hunting practices. Some humane progress could have been made. But politics is not a rational business when the blood is up. The more a ban was promised, retreated from, turned into a middle way, turned back onto a full ban, the more both sides are goaded.

Mr Blair fears abstract coalitions of discontent far more than he fears any foe in Parliament, existing or prospective. The Countryside Alliance is informal in structure, unwieldy, unaccountable. That is precisely what makes it so potent. The most significant achievement of the hunt ban protesters has been to absorb other parts of rural protest under its banner.

Liberty and Livelihood - the march's slogan - artfully welds together the foxhunters with the other discontents as various as the handling of the foot-and-mouth epidemic, the Common Agricultural Policy and BSE. Some of these things can be laid at the door of successive governments. A lot of them are to do with people's own changing attitudes.

Like a lot of Londoners, I hail from far away and elsewhere - rural County Durham in my case. Perhaps that is why the divisive rhetoric of the Alliance grates. So many of us are, to adapt the late Tammy Wynette, a little bit country and a little bit of urban rock 'n' roll.

It is one of the worst tactics of the Alliance to suggest that the interests of town and country are antipathetical - the cheapest rhetorical blast in the book from the bumpkin/metropolitan jibes of Restoration Comedy and Karl Marx's brutal assessment of the "idiocy of rural life".

Because it is such a giddy alliance, the good arguments are all jumbled up with the bad and with the more extreme. There is a zealotry here that is not entirely healthy. I notice it when my friends who are protesting against the ban seem to be asking the rest of us how we can not join them.

You are either with us or against us: a culture I distrust because it always hides something a bit nasty at the fringes.

The Countryside Alliance is now a major organising force and because its message (or rather array of messages) attracts large numbers of decent people, it also has some responsibilities that it needs to take more seriously than it does. For a start, it should cut off any members who are supporters of violent or disruptive action. For too long now, the Alliance has been playing the Sinn Fein game of tolerating people who are prepared to go to extremes that impinge on other people in pursuit of their aims.

However strongly people feel about their way of life and their livelihoods, this is unacceptable. It is no more right for a huntsman to blockade the road or take to violent protest than it was for the miners to try to block the roads when the pits were being closed.

The nature of a mature democracy is that we pursue our interests and make our protests felt strongly and consistently against injustices - but not at the expense of bringing down the edifice of mutual respect. This has been insufficiently stressed by the Alliance and it needs to be said unambiguously before the march and after it.

Newsnight reported this week on opponents of the hunt ban threatening blockades on the model of the fuel protests to get their way. Asked why the Alliance tolerated as a leading campaigner Brian Hughes - the huntsman who organised the blockade of the Severn Bridge two years ago and claims now that there are "hundreds and thousands or people ready to break the law, disrupt Parliament, whatever it takes" - the Alliance's urbane chief executive Richard Burge replied that the organisation's job was to get the ban lifted "so that Brian doesn't have to go to these lengths". He did not "welcome blockading", he added, indeed did not " condone violent action".

This is the language of Sinn Fein talking about the IRA. "Brian" (cosy first name terms) does not "have to" blockade bridges if he doesn't get his way on the hunt ban. Mr Burge should not slide into passive acceptance of extremism by failing to say clearly what is not acceptable behaviour or threat for anyone associated with the Countryside Alliance.

I hope that an unworkable ban does not come to pass and that the Government gives the countryside's complaints the hearing they deserve. I hope that the sun shines on the marchers this weekend and that they deliver their message in good heart and with dignity. And I hope London welcomes them as they do because our town and country reside on a small island - and we are all in it together.

 

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