Rebel British
Meanwhile the British people, the end-point of this frantic activity, proved as unpredictably stroppy as they always had been. In general, it was moral and cultural protest that took the place of the economic controversies of earlier decades. Through most of the Blair years the fox-hunting struggle engorged month after month of parliamentary time and unbelievable amounts of political energy. Polling suggested the country cared almost as little about it as the Prime Minister – plenty of people had views, but few held them strongly. Behind this, though, was the determination of animal rights activists to get something out of an avowedly radical government, while the Countryside Alliance (which expanded its campaigning to include fishing, organic food and much else) represented a feeling that part of the historic nation was being ignored, that there were people of all classes who did not fit into the New Labour world-view.
Fox hunting was a country pursuit since medieval times; the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight contains a description from around the year 1370 which is recognizable in its essentials today. By the 1670s, its rituals, red coats, language and literature were a part of British culture known around the world. Only a part, however: hunting always had its detractors. In the eighteenth century, the fox-hunting Tory squire, red-faced and stupid, was a staple of urban Whig propaganda. (The hunting nickname for the fox, Charlie, refers to the great Whig radical Charles James Fox.) Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the thunderous passage of whooping huntsmen became an emblem among radicals of oppressive aristocracy riding roughshod over the people. In Oscar Wilde’s phrase they were ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’. Little followed from this until the arrival in the middle of the twentieth century of a militant animal rights movement, determined to frustrate hunting by using scent sprays, horns and human barriers. The first example of saboteurs at work seems to have been in August 1958 when members of the League Against Cruel Sports (which had been founded much earlier, in 1927) used chemicals to try to disrupt the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. Direct action like this began to be used against fox hunters too, with the North Warwickshire and the Old Berkeley at Amersham confronted in 1962-3. In December 1963 the Hunt Saboteurs Association was formed by a young journalist in Brixham, Devon, and the practice quickly spread.
Confrontations between hunt supporters and ‘Sabs’, often violent with the police in full pursuit, became a regular feature of country life from then on. Sabs would compare themselves to the hunters, needing quick wits, courage and good tactics to confuse the hounds and allow the fox or stag to escape. They were accused of thuggery. They accused the hunt supporters of being brutal to them, and many bones and noses were broken in the bracken. There was a bit of class conflict and of city-against-country in it all. Over time it became clear that while the Sabs might save some foxes, they were unable to stop the hunts, so animal rights activists turned increasingly to Parliament to get it banned. Labour voters and MPs tended to be against hunting, and the party took a £100,000 donation from the animal rights lobby before the 1997 election. When New Labour won with a massive majority it was clear that a parliamentary move to ban hunting with hounds was inevitable. With so many MPs committed, it would probably become law. This directly affected the 200,000 people who were hunting regularly and with those who watched and supported them, perhaps half a million in all. A new organization, the Countryside Alliance, was formed to campaign against a ban and held its first big rally, with 120,000 people present, at Hyde Park, six weeks after the election.
From then on pro-hunting protests were continual and varied. There were marches at Labour Party conferences, in Scotland where a separate and earlier ban was being passed, outside Parliament and in many other towns throughout Britain. People had always been on the march about something, but whereas before it had been students in duffel-coats, coalminers or left-wingers in leather jackets, this time it was ruddy-faced women in tweed skirts, farm-workers and former public schoolboys – Boden and loden, Barbour and brogue. In the Blair years, the sound of hunting horns, the excited yelping of hounds and even the clatter of hooves became part of the backdrop of parliamentary life. After a noisy march in Bournemouth, Blair himself joined in the argument, telling his conference in 1999 that he would sweep away the ‘forces of conservatism’ and branding the Conservatives ‘the party of fox hunting, Pinochet and hereditary peers – the uneatable, the unspeakable and the unelectable’.
This was a rare and quickly regretted Blair incursion into the language of leftism. He never much cared about hunting one way or another, and wished the issue would vanish. It did not. John Prescott, more of a class warrior than his leader, enlivened the 2001 election when a burly Countryside protester threw an egg at him during a visit to Rhyl, Wales, and was rewarded with a hefty punch. After the election Labour MPs pressed ahead while on the other side, vigils were mounted, topless women delivered petitions to Whitehall and a thousand horses rode through Leicester as part of a ‘summer of discontent’ in 2002. That September, the Alliance claimed more than 400,000 supporters in its biggest ‘Liberty and Livelihood’ protest outside the Commons, a protest which saw violent confrontations between the police and angry young men in tweed caps and waxed olive jackets.
On 18 November 2004 a law banning hunting with hounds finally passed its parliamentary hurdles. After legal challenges it became law the following February though the many loopholes, allowing riders with hounds to flush out foxes, which could then be shot, meant hunts carried on across England and Wales. The day after the ban took effect, thousands were out again and ninety-one foxes were killed. There, as in Scotland, the hunts continue and Sabs still follow with cameras, trying to find evidence of law-breaking. There have been very few prosecutions. Bloody predictions of masters of foxhounds shooting their dogs and then hanging themselves, a nightmare hanging over Labour spin-doctors for several years, were never realized. The fox hunting story can serve as a symbol for much else in the New Labour years: a long and noisy confrontation at Westminster, which in the end had surprisingly little effect on the ground.
The first intimation that protest could go further under New Labour than noisy pro-hunting demonstrations came in 2000, when a nationwide revolt by truckers against high petrol prices brought the country to a standstill. The automatic increase in fuel duty had in fact been briefly halted, but rising world oil prices and the high petrol taxes already in place meant unheard-of prices at the petrol pumps. A group of irate truckers, men who owned their own lorries, held a protest meeting in Wales and decided to mount a brief blockade of a giant oil refinery in Cheshire. They attracted widespread news coverage and an enthusiastic reaction from ordinary drivers. To begin with, Blair and his ministers concluded that it was not a serious challenge and continued with their plans. A command centre was established at Cobra, the bland meeting-room below Downing Street from where national crises are directed.
The Prime Minister himself went ahead with a tour of the English Midlands, due to end with a celebration of John Prescott’s thirty years in Parliament in a Hull Chinese restaurant. On the way, officials and journalists noted V-formations of slow-moving lorries blocking motorways in other parts of the country and followed reports of petrol stations in the north of England running dry, or being besieged by queues of panicky motorists. More refineries were blockaded. Still Blair and his team insisted that nothing was really wrong and the tour would go on. He would not be diverted. By that evening, with Prescott in a Hull town hall surrounded by countryside protesters, he was getting a different message. Told that he could not be guaranteed a getaway from the splendid Chinese restaurant, he apologized to his deputy and headed for Sheffield, still insisting the show would go on. On the following morning, after overnight briefings, he gave in, turned tail and sped back to London to take charge.
Blair was generally good in a crisis and began trying to knock heads together. But this time the oil company bosses would not help him by ordering drivers of petrol tankers, who were both self-employed and sympathetic to the fuel protesters, to break through the pickets. Blair raged, threatened and begged. Now all across Britain, petrol stations ran dry. Wherever petrol remained, vast queues formed. It was all perfectly good-humoured but the crisis was spinning out of Blair’s hands. Food shortages were reported. Bread was going, milk was going and the nation’s egg-laying chickens were in danger. What was left of Britain’s manufacturing industry was close to being forced to suspend working. Yet all tests of public opinion showed the majority of the country was with the protesters not the government. Brown repeatedly refused to pre-announce his March Budget by promising cuts in fuel taxes, in response to blackmail by two thousand to three thousand hauliers. There was private talk of bringing in the army, forcing the blockades. Panicky-sounding government papers were leaked and Blair came close to begging the protesters to stop: ‘This is not on, you know. This is just not right…’ Eventually, after health service managers had warned that people would soon die, and with even the anti-Blair press telling the protesters that enough was enough, the blockades were lifted and life returned to normal. Brown made a crabwise but generous-enough move on petrol duty in his Budget and something close to honour was restored. Yet Britain had come very close to the kind of collapse not seen since the winter of 1978-9.
The country quickly bounced back – there was no threatening undertow in the 2001 election. The combination of early Prudence and the public spending promised had played well with the electorate. John Major was succeeded as party leader by the most talented Tory of his generation, the young, bright, bald and witty Yorkshireman, William Hague. A natural Thatcherite since his schooldays and a political obsessive, he had done his best to make his leadership seem trendier and more in touch with modern Britain, donning a baseball cap and visiting the Notting Hill carnival. He was mocked for it, and learned. Hague was a man of some political experience, having been with Norman Lamont at the Treasury and later Welsh Secretary, and his greatest achievement was that he stopped a bewildered and defeated party tearing itself apart. At his best in the Commons, he had been a sparkling Opposition leader, discomfiting Blair and leading the charge on Labour ‘stealth taxes’, the Dome and the new issue of bogus asylum-seekers. But heavily concentrating his election campaign on saving the pound, promising voters ‘we will give you back your country’ and attacking the still-popular Blair as a slimy liar, he allowed New Labour to portray his party as xenophobic and nasty. By any standard, the Tory attack failed. Labour was returned with a majority of 166, having lost just six seats net, and the Conservatives, after all their energy and hard work, managed a single net gain. It was an important election because it cemented the New Labour achievement of 1997 and showed the country had moved towards Blair’s agenda. Yet this general election will be remembered for one other ominous statistic too. The turnout was – just – below 60 per cent. Since Britain had first become a democracy, the public had never been less interested in voting.