Article for The Scotsman on foxhunting, 27 July 1999

Author: Michael Portillo

The Eddisbury by-election was tawdry even by the standards set since Peter Mandelson became involved with Labour election tactics more than a decade ago. Viewers across Britain disliked seeing the Prime Minister being heckled by a crowd of what they took to be Tories. The electors were unhappy to receive from the Labour candidate, Ms Margaret Hanson, a series of personal attacks on her Conservative opponent, Stephen O’Brien.

Ms Hanson, fought a lacklustre campaign, and New Labour certainly didn’t allow her to speak in public. Instead she inveighed against Mr O’Brien in leaflets depicting him as a faceless figure in hunting pink. She aimed to convert the election into a referendum on foxhunting.

The constituency certainly contains plenty of countryside. But on my brief visit, the villages struck me as more twee than rustic, and they resounded with the revving of BMWs rather than the neighing of hunters. This Cheshire community didn’t seem to live principally for country pursuits. Mr O’Brien looked as though he would be more comfortable sitting on a company board than on a stallion. He is the chairman of the Conservative Association in distant Chichester, but has vowed to move to the constituency. Ms Hanson is married to the Labour MP for a Welsh constituency, and vowed to remain with her family (and therefore not to live in Eddisbury or even in England). This contest between two outsiders over an issue that seemed not to grip the locals, might leave you asking how foxhunting had become the chosen battleground.

The answer is that Mr Blair committed his party to abolition on Question Time. Far be it from me as a "wholly out-of-touch-Tory" to question the judgement of a Prime Minister who must have tested the proposition with many focus groups, but I suspect he’s made a miscalculation. If the policy announcement was designed to win Eddisbury, it failed. There was also some hubris in his visit to the constituency, as though the very magnanimity of his fleeting appearance in Cheshire were expected to clinch victory.

Opinion polls on foxhunting may not be wholly reliable. It’s clearly a minority interest, and is widely opposed. But some people probably respond to pollsters according to what they think is politically correct. The violence of the hunt saboteurs may even have intimidated some into giving what seems a "safe" answer. In any case, the argument has some distance to run yet, even if the Scottish parliament is able to move faster on abolition than that at Westminster.

Crucially, Labour has crossed an important line in wishing to convert disapproving opinion into legislation. Its much-vaunted defence of minorities applies only to groups of which it approves. Labour believes that even if a majority in this country disapproves of gay sex at age 16, legislation must provide freedom for homosexuals. Many Conservatives agree. On the issue of abortion, many Labour and Tory politicians believe women should be free to choose. But when it comes to foxhunting, Labour will end the freedom of the minority to placate the sensitivities of a supposed majority.
It may not be just Catholics who fail immediately to grasp the theology that underlies the Prime Minister’s position. Parliament has often confirmed that terminating a human embryo is a matter of free choice. Now Mr Blair will invite it to legislate that terminating a fox (with dogs) should be a criminal offence.

Mr Blair told us he had won the general election as New Labour, and would govern as New Labour. Suddenly that doesn’t look so clear. The main motivation for the abolitionists is not fox welfare, but class warfare - against toffs who dress in silly clothes, career about the fields as though they owned the place, and lord it over grooms and blacksmiths. If Mr Blair doesn’t yet recognise that this is dangerous nonsense, certainly some of his advisers do. They are subjecting the Question Time pledge to detailed textual analysis in the hope that the Prime Minister has allowed himself an exit.
One of Mr Blair’s skills, in contrast to Mrs Thatcher, was his ability to avoid offending vested interests and lobby groups. His buzzwords were "consensus" and "inclusivity". Neither country folk nor car drivers feel much included now.

The campaign against cars is still more dangerous for Mr Blair. Labour has developed a stereotype of a motorist who combines the features of a fat cat and Mr Toad. In fact its policy of high fuel taxes hits families who have just achieved their ambition of affording a car, being mobile for the first time, and so free and independent. Mr Prescott’s new bus lane on the M4 from Heathrow to London allows fat cats in taxis to zoom past the long-suffering commuter, and save a fiver on their fare. Labour talks as though selfish motorists were refusing to use the trains that run empty every day. In fact conditions on commuter railways are so inhumanly crowded that passengers might happily bribe those standing next to them to use their cars tomorrow and free up some space. The people who sweat in the daily congestion on the trains would like to enjoy good open roads at the weekend at least. Not surprisingly, when Mr Blair appeared on Question Time he was asked more questions about transport than foxhunting.

Increasingly the government inhabits a world of its own. The Prime Minister has created an establishment which prides itself on being liberal, but is actually dictatorial. Its intolerance is directed against hunting, smoking, driving - and keeping the pound sterling. As the Prime Minister moves amongst editors, ambassadors, the CBI and even bishops, he won’t find his positions greatly challenged. For the BBC, such opinions constitute an irrefutable natural order of things. Elsewhere those views seem, rather, to be the smug preserve of a new elite which is comfortably off, intellectual, mainly urban and mainly southern.
Mr Blair is at last finding it hard to be all things to all men (and women).