The Frightening Success of the Countryside Alliance
Ruling Class hits the Warpath
By the time you read this, the Countryside Alliance demonstration in central London will have taken place on March 1. In size, it is likely to dwarf recent labour movement mobilisations. The first march last July attracted 120,000 people.
The ostensible reason for the demonstration was to oppose MP Michael Foster's anti-hunting bill. Indeed, it was the British Field Sports Society which was the backbone of the mobilisation. Different hunts, area by area, took on the chartering of special trains. Agricultural colleges mobilised fleets of coaches, and reactionary local papers publicised march organisers' contact numbers under front page headlines.
75 per cent of the public has long opposed hunting with hounds. Yet when a parliament friendly to abolition is elected, it is the hunters whose mobilisations draw the numbers, not the abolitionists whose last counter-march drew only a few thousand people. Partly this failure is due to the timidity and "respectability" of the big animal welfare/anti-hunt organisations.
But the real strength of this movement goes much deeper than that. Many ruling class people feel that an attack on hunting is a direct attack on them as a class. Hunting with hounds is replete with a symbolism of Britishness, of the continuity of class rule, and of their right to exclusive use of the countryside as their playground.
Those same landowners and farmers who were indignant at the very suggestion of a "freedom to roam" over our countryside (which Labour looks set to drop) assume exactly that freedom for themselves with a pack of hounds at their front.
The clash between town and country which the march organisers highlight is in fact a clash between working people and the ruling class, as any hunt saboteur knows who has had "go back to your concrete jungle" or "get back to the smoke" shouted in her/his face.
Our problem is that the class struggle in the countryside has been won decisively by the ruling class. They see it as "their" countryside, and a place in which poor people or other cultures have only bit parts as service workers or quaint country characters.
Of course, working people still live in the countryside (and new patterns of migration are bringing huge numbers of better off working and middle class people back into rural areas. But they offer no political challenge as a whole.
This means that the ruling class is unchallenged in its cultural hegemony there. And the key images of rural life which they purvey - of Brideshead stately homes, of thatched cottages, of class peace and social harmony (no blacks, no muggings) and of ancient traditions, are seeing a new burst of life.
The march was thus able to organise a far wider coalition of interests. Farmers - bruised by the beef crisis, falling agricultural incomes, rising attacks on subsidy and on their destructive farming practices - turned out in force.
And opponents of Prescott's developmentalist solutions to housing pressures organised hard, too. In West Sussex, Prescott's sanctioning of an extra 12,500 new homes in a county where two thirds of the landscape is of National Park standard, and where strains on wider resources, roads and services are already at breaking point, has caused deep outrage - most of which has been captured by the right.
We ignore this huge reactionary mobilisation at our peril. Only 9 months into a Labour government, the ruling class - not the workers' movement - is massively on the move to defend their interests.
Lenin said (to paraphrase) that until the industrial workers saw that the flogging of a Siberian peasant thousands of miles distant was their business, there would be no revolution.
The left must update this. Unless we see that the cruel harrying to death of a fox is our business, then the ruling class will continue to run circles round us, too.