Issue: 20 November 2004	PAGE 3 of 4 next >>

Socialism is dead, along with most of what those MPs once believed in, and the knowledge of that has morally corroded them. They are inwardly ashamed of themselves, and they search for one token issue to make themselves feel good. The Bill assuages MPs’ self-hatred and sense of their own betrayal, so that a former radical like Peter Hain, now a Cabinet minister working with servile loyalty for a government he would once have hated, insists on forcing through the Hunting Bill.

In one other respect the conduct of those politicians is still more contemptible. Fox-hunting was traditionally the sport of English army officers. Young officers were encouraged or even expected to hunt, to stiffen the sinews and learn to read the lie of the land. There is a vivid and poignant reminder of that tradition in the William Nicholson exhibition now showing at the Royal Academy. Nicholson’s elegaic 1928 dust-jacket for Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon shows on the front panel a red hunting coat draped over a chair with a pair of hunting top boots standing next to it, echoed on the back by an infantry officer’s tunic next to a pair of army riding boots. In Sassoon’s day, before and after the Great War, there were plenty of MPs who hunted, and plenty who knew the meaning of war from personal experience.

What a contrast our present legislators display! We have today, for the first time, a government of which no member has ever performed military service. Nor, as far as I am aware, has any Labour MP apart from the utterly risible Major Eric Joyce, though I may be wrong. Two veteran politicians who are both ardent supporters of the hunting ban are Lord Hattersley in the Lords and Sir Gerald Kaufman in the Commons. Both men are in their seventies and thus of an age to have done National Service, but the usual sources do not make it clear what form this took. Maybe they are both modestly concealing their gallant pasts, in which case we should be enlightened.

As for Joyce, he is the man who complained that his talents were unrecognised in the army, whose superior officers found him impossible to command, who left proclaiming the wonderful words that ‘War fighting is not the primary purpose of an army’, and who then acted on Shaun Woodward’s equally memorable maxim that ‘New Labour is not a party for people of any particular class or any particular view’ to find a cushy billet as the Member for Falkirk West. Joyce has since become a ‘loyalist’ notorious even under this government for his unswerving sycophancy, and at the same time he is right up in the expenses league with a cool £152,861 claimed last year. A quarter of a century ago, the truly honourable Tam Dalyell posed the West Lothian Question: after devolution, what would be the purpose of the Scottish MPs at Westminster? Poor Tam was being naive. Their purpose is, of course, to vote to ban hunting in England while filling their pockets with taxpayers’ money.

You might think that, as long as a single serving soldier hunted, civilian politicians would have the humility and decency to leave their sport alone. But then you would not know New Labour. Its politicians have no love for military life or the military virtues. Even Blair avoided serving in the cadet corps at Fettes, and Peter Mandelson expressed his sneering disdain with fascinating unconsciousness when he was talking (and sucking up) to a Dublin audience, and called the Brigade of Guards ‘chinless wonders’. Mandelson was Northern Ireland secretary at the time and more in need of military protection than any other minister; he quite forgot Kipling’s deadly line about ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’.

Now if this were a pacifistic party, if every Labour MP was another George Lansbury, one could admire them and possibly even respect their zeal to end that soldierly sport. But to the contrary, Tony Blair has notoriously committed British troops to more wars than any other prime minister in living memory. Labour loves sending young men to kill and be killed, just so long as our politicians are never expected to risk their own skins.