A bloody farce

What a won­der­ful day it’s been for Brit­ish demo­cracy. For­get about the White­hall farces of old, because the real farce was hap­pen­ing just down the road in Westminster.

Warn­ing: the fol­low­ing invect­ive will prob­ably lack coher­ent and care­fully thought out argu­ments. Neither will it employ my usual attempts at eleg­ant wording.

Why? Because I’m in a fuck­ing awful mood, that’s why.

Look, let’s make no bones about it. The bloody ‘sport’ of hunt­ing with dogs should have been banned years ago — almost seven years ago, in fact. New Labour always plainly stated from the out­set that they inten­ded to do away with fox-hunting. Yet, when they came to power, Blair’s des­per­ate wish to keep the upper-middle classes pla­cated meant that he sat on the fence when it came to their coun­tryside pur­suits, and a red-tape tangle of free votes ensued. This was fol­lowed by block­ing votes in the Lords and the bill con­tinu­ally com­ing up against a lack of par­lia­ment­ary time for its com­ple­tion. Like I said, a West­min­ster farce in the making.

Today, approx­im­ately 10,000 people who like killing foxes for fun gathered out­side the Houses of Par­lia­ment to vocally express their oppos­i­tion to the pro­posed ban. Fine, that’s their right of protest. Yet they brought with them a minor­ity of knuckle-headed thugs — look­ing more like the type who go around twist­ing foxes’ necks with their bare hands rather than chas­ing them down with horses and hounds — who tried to break through the bar­ri­cades with a com­bin­a­tion of fly­ing fists and brute violence.

Mean­while, inside the cor­ridors of power, all hell broke loose after five pro-hunting protest­ors gained access to the House of Com­mons cham­ber in a breach of secur­ity that seems to have been so laugh­ably easy that you won­der whether the last line of pro­tec­tion sur­round­ing MPs is a bloke called Ted who reg­u­larly falls asleep while ready his copy of Exchange & Mart. What on earth is going on?

The good news, of course, is that with the above com­bin­a­tion of actions, the pro-hunting lobby have prob­ably shot them­selves in the foot (rather than shoot­ing the foxes in the head after the hounds have failed to fully dis­patch their prey — sorry, I’m labour­ing the point, aren’t I?). Viol­ence in Par­lia­ment Square and storm­ing the bar­ri­cades of London’s biggest gentleman’s club — sorry, seat of gov­ern­ment — isn’t going to endear to you many MPs, even those right-wing toffs who hap­pen to enjoy a spot of rural bru­tal­ity on horse­back at the week­ends: “It’s simply not the done thing, chaps; I can’t be seen to sup­port such wil­ful troublemakers.”

The Com­mons vote was always going to be unan­im­ously in favour of ban­ning hunt­ing, just as it has been on every other occa­sion since 1997 on which MPs have had an oppor­tun­ity to make their views known on the mat­ter. But fol­low­ing today’s out­break of chaos, it wouldn’t sur­prise me if a few more waver­ing mem­bers were per­suaded over to the win­ning side. In that sense, then, we must extend our heart­felt thanks to the fox mur­der­ers — er, sorry, I mean the pro-hunting lobby.

So this surely means that we can finally get on with the busi­ness of get­ting this bar­baric prac­tice banned, once and for all?

The resound­ing answer is: er, yes. Even­tu­ally. Well, by July 2006, any­way. Hopefully.

Incred­ible. We’re giv­ing the hunt bri­gade yet another period of grace; it’s to allow them some time to “read­just”, appar­ently. Well, they’ve had seven long years — isn’t that enough? Oh, wait a minute, there’s a gen­eral elec­tion on the cards, isn’t there? Don’t want to upset the Coun­tryside Alli­ance and their sup­port­ers, do we?

Whilst I under­stand the game of party polit­ical advant­age that’s going on here, surely the New Labour election-winning machine is going to have to real­ise that it’s lost that par­tic­u­lar group of voters, whether the law gets changed now or in eight­een months. They’re unlikely to change their minds and think that Tony’s not such a bad bloke because he’s delay­ing the inev­it­able. So why not just get the law over and done with and onto the stat­ute books as quickly as possible?

And in the mean­time, of course, the dod­der­ing old peers in the House of Lords will con­tinue to block the pas­sage of the bill with every last breath in their bod­ies (which for some of them isn’t very long). Yes, I know we keep being told that the gov­ern­ment can use the Par­lia­ment Act to push through the law if they wish — but for a lead­er­ship that’s so scared of rock­ing the boat, will they really have the nerve?

It’s all very messy. Very con­fus­ing. Rather than resem­bling demo­cracy in action, the saga over the hunt­ing bill seems to have made a mock­ery of the whole noble ideal.

A final (and extremely unpleas­ant) thought, then. Watch­ing the news cov­er­age of today’s events out­side Par­lia­ment, I couldn’t help but won­der what would have happened if the moun­ted police had turned up wear­ing hunt­ing gear and blow­ing horns, and instead of try­ing to restore order had simply sent out a pack of bloodthirsty hounds to chase down the protest­ors and tear them limb from limb. Maybe one of the younger officers could have had his face smeared with the blood of the first protestor to be killed, just so he could get a lifelong scent for the chase.

Oh, silly me. That would have been a cruel, bar­baric and com­pletely unne­ces­sary level of viol­ence, wouldn’t it?