I am writing an important letter to William Hague on his proposed inquiry into torture (via my MP to make sure an FCO bureaucrat does not bury it). I am marshalling my evidence but trying to keep it short, plain and unemotional.
So no energy or time for significant blogging today. Some thoughts to keep people going.
I am staunchly against fox-hunting. In my youth I was in the Hunt Saboteurs Association and remember great fun laying aniseed trails to disrupt otter hunts somewhere near Kings Lynn. I would happily do that again. I supported the ban on fox-hunting.
But I have changed my mind. I still strongly oppose fox-hunting, but I no longer think it should be illegal. New Labour changed my mind. They opened my eyes to the dangers of authoritarianism and the criminalisation of numerous activities. The mind that will ban protest outside parliament and make it illegal to photograph a policeman or railway station, is a mind seeking to abuse the power of the state.
New Labour convinced me that excessive state power is a real evil to weigh in the balance when considering how to deal with any issue. I consider fox hunting an ill, but state interference a greater ill. Any liberal should believe that the state should interfere in liberty as a last resort.
Other forms of social sanction can and should be deployed against fox hunters. Social disapprobation, ridicule, protest, peaceful disruption. But is the crushing hand of the state really required? No, I don’t think it is.
The same goes in my view for the smoking ban. I don’t smoke and hate cigarette smoke, But should it be illegal in pubs and restaurants, which are private property? No.
Lights blue touchpaper and goes back to his letter to William Hague…
It’s wrong to ‘hunt’ foxes but you must remember that to farmers they are a pest. Some people (city dwellers naturally) don’t have a realistic view and tend to Disneyfy these animals…
Good post though, and I largely agree with it.
Good post – agree with the whole thing about foxhunting. I seem to recall that the foxhunting issue, and its attendant legislation, was effectively a media-management ploy at the time (it obscured another more pressing and relevant issues which, heh, I cant remember just now). So yes, argue passionately against, but not make illegal.
But with the smoking ban – hmm, gotta say that on balance I agree with it. Tobacco is a vile, addictive concoction (I know, I used to be a smoker)(and am still drawn by the smell and memory of it, even tho actually smoking one is now revolting), stuffed with poisons of every kind; and is it not the case that since the ban there has been a significant reduction in smoking-related diseases?
I’ve wondered about fox hunting for some time. In sheep-rearing country, I can see the point – it is rather literally terrorism against foxes. It couldn’t be more conspicuous; a dozen or more red jackets on horseback, with a horn and a pack of braying dogs. If you wanted to send the message “Foxes – don’t even think about living here”, you couldn’t really find a more noticable method. It arguable saves foxes lives by scaring most of them away from the area, rather than them being shot to prevent predation.
However, hounds tearing a fox apart revolts me. I don’t suppose that’s any consolation to a lamb that gets eaten by a fox.
Of coures the fox hunting issue has little to do with animal suffering, and much to do with decades of tribal rivalry between Labour and Conservative.
Hi Craig and fellow bloggers. I hate animal sport of any kind.Living in Spain we know all about ‘blood sports’..I am also a non smoker but once again here in Spain people smoke in bars and restaurants. The weather is good so you may sit outside if it bothers you.
Love the way you think Craig and look out for you daily on Twitter.Just off to tweet you.
ditto illegal drugs
I agree completely. As a parliamentary candidate in Lincolnshire, my stand on hunting was: “I wouldn’t allow it on my land but it’s not a matter for legislation”. At the time my land was a cottage in Market Rasen with a small concrete yard.
I disapprove of fox hunting, but don’t believe it should be given parliamentary time. It was used by Labour as a proxy for radicalism – look at us, we’re stopping those cruel toffs from killing cute little furry things. Rather like Brown’s photo with his missus in front of Auschwitz, it was an attempt to establish a bogus identity.
At the time of the hunting ban I lived in the constituency with the highest concentraion of nuclear weapons in the UK – possibly in Europe. Had there been an accident or an attack, several thousand square miles of the planet’s surface would have been utterly sterilised for a few thousand years. The local Labour MP continued an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear weapons, and an equally enthisiastic opponent of the hunt. I often wondered if it would have been worth pointing out to him the number of foxes who would perish given an incident at Coulport, Faslane or Glen Douglas. He obviously set little value on the people.
I remain opposed to hunting because of the cruelty involved.
On smoking, if the ban is ever lifted it’s vital that no-one is compelled to work in a smoky atmosphere. That is also an abuse of human rights since people can be made ill by an atmosphere of cigarette smoke. The government’s rhetoric is still about compelling the unemployed to work, despite the lack of jobs. I remember the effects of cigarette smoke from my time working in a bar and wouldn’t wish to compel anyone to suffer it. I also recall student spaces being inaccessible to students with certain medical conditions because cigarette smoke was so damaging to them. I see your points about the dangers of intrusive government but it’s one of those difficult areas about competing liberties which sends me back to John Stuart Mill.
(Perhaps the best solution in practice is the one I’ve observed in France – smoking is officially banned so bars and cafes are more pleasant than previously and non-smokers are no longer consigned to the dingiest corner or a single table. However nobody seems too worried about occasional breaches of the ban in small bars, etc.)
Good Post Craig,
I dont agree with fox hunting, but I also dont agree with a ban. Ife we have freedom then we have freedom, and that freedom will always involve other peoples freedom to d things that we dont like. We are all different. The proper way to change things in a free society is to make the thing we dont like socially unacceptable, not use state power to do it.
Smoking…. the governemnt has the right to ban it on government property, but I dont believe it has the right to ban it on private property. If the owner of a business wants to make it a smoking zone then thats their choice and the choice of the employee’s and customers to work / visit that place.
Let people decide for themselves…. Nulabs nanny state was a nightmare.
No need for the blue touchpaper – I agree with you and so, it seems, do most people here. I don’t smoke, and hate the smell of it, but I thought banning it wholesale in pubs was an outrage. It’s like banning praying in church. Although I might approve of that 🙂
Brilliant, and as a true liberal I’d like to see dog fighting & bear baiting back too. The way they’ve oppressed our freedom to torture animals is disgraceful.
“New Labour convinced me that excessive state power is a real evil”
And there was never any excessive state power under the tories. Oh No!
I don’t know chemicals they sprayed on you LD membership card Craig, but tell them form me, it’s damn fine stuff.
What about Hunting UK weapons inspectors? Will the COon/LD govt spend any time investigating the legality of that?
Yes, children of the countryside should be instructed to hunt the hunters, shooting them with the guns of tom foolery and ensnaring them in traps of ridicule. Gangs should congregate in the forests and run hither and thither, shouting LA LA LA LA LA to warn the foxes of impending peril. Groups of youth should be brought in from inner city areas and brought drinks in their local pubs, disrupting their quiet sanctuary. Kebab eating contests should be held in their peaceful village greens.
Tally-ho! Madam, render unto me my red cape, my hunting-horn and my whip!
Good on you, Craig – I’m sure you’ll make sure that Hague (a very intelligent man and an excellent writer who ought to know better than most the lessons of history) gets the message. I hope he/ they will listen and act accordingly. Let’s not hold our collective breath – but it’s crucial that your letter is on the record.
David, I think your suggestion (12:38) represents a good balance. These ethical matters often entail seeking a balance between different people’s rights and the societal parameters within which it becomes feasible that individual freedom be realised.
Re. smoking, I’m well aware of the toxic dynamics of the tobacco companies – if we rail against drug companies and (sometimes reflexively, it seems to me) against everyone associated with them, should we not also rail against Big Tobacco?
I think that the ban in public indoor places was reasonable – apart from the long-term passive smoking argument, if you know anyone with brittle asthma, you’ll know how hellish it could be if someone lit up at a table adjacent to you. But I think that David’s suggestion of their being indoor places where people who want to smoke can go – and not dinghy Prohibition-era sites, either! – is a reasonable one. I think there needs to be flexibility and balance.
I think, for instance, that banning smoking on-stage was an utterly ludicrous act. Artificial fags look like… artificial fags. In any case, the idiocy of it stained the entire exercise, revealed the lumpen-mentality of those who insisted on its implementation and was emblematic of the oppressive architectonic of their philosophy.
A large element of that ‘philosophy’ arose from a tactical need to divert attention from the active and systemic criminality in which the government was engaged in relation to arms dealing and war.
And so, a la rock music circa now, we have a behavioural politics obsessed with tokens, gestures, persiflage. This manifests – as Galton might have hypothesised – primarily through the use (or rather, misuse) of language. It becomes a crime to take a photo of an old engine on a station platform but not a crime to arrest someone for taking such a photograph. It becomes a crime to kill a fox, but not a crime to gun down an electrician.
I second technicolour here, and think you’re all rather getting carried away on a “true liberal” bandwagon. Craig’s comparison with the outlawing of protest outside parliament, or the taking of pictures in public, is bloody daft: these are +democratic+ freedoms, essential to the lifeblood of our democracy. They harm no-one, and they are also of no lethal harm, given that the suggested connection between photography and the planning of a terrorist atrocity was plainly ridiculous from the start.
But what is the freedom to set a hound upon a fox, to force it to exhaustion and then heart failure, and then to have it torn limb from bloody limb? Is that a +democratic+ freedom? I think you’ve lost the plot on this one, or perhaps you’re just slowly turning into Tories!
You appear to propose that if Labour passed a law, it was necessarily authoritarian. Blair was an abomination, as were a number of his inner sect. But this is an assumption too far.
Side note: I don’t think Cameron is much bothered either way on fox hunting, but the countryside set are natural Tory voters, and he is not sufficiently concerned about animal cruelty to stand up to an “important” voting group.
Thank you for that. I agree with all of it. Heavy-handed legislation has been the ‘legacy’ of New Labour, as I was witnessing yet another liberty disappear (it felt) far too frequently. Appalling.
Mike Cobley – your last sentence requires at least a link. I proffer it’s far too early to see any evidence like that! Plus, it’s beside the point – loss of freedoms and the making of second-class citizens out of a huge swathe of over-taxed society. The total ban is not only wrong, it is unnecessary. Many options could have satisfied all – those who smoke and (safeguarding) those who don’t. Smokers KNOW the arguments. It is about freedom to choose. Enough proscriptive ‘it’s for your own good’. Enough!
The Druid,
Not sure if you were being sarcastic, but that is in fact precisely what I think we should do!
I was being kind of tongue in cheek but i do completely agree.
Sounds like a treat. If and when you make any plans for any of this, count me in.
Jon, I don’t think Craig was equating it; I sense he may have been suggesting that it was emblematic, in the end, of a certain type of thought-process that manifested malevolently in the political sphere.
So,, in my view, if they’d just banned fox-hunting but had been libertarian in other aspects (by libertarian in this context I simply mean respecting our democratic freedoms, such as they were), I don’t think many people except the hang ’em, flog ’em bods would’ve been too concerned. It turned out differently, though, didn’t it. New Labour was partly about pandering to populist sentiment and fox-hunting gave them an opportunity to demonstrate ‘liberal’ credentials which, in retrospect, had no subtsance. So, they let Pinochet go. All style, no substance.
Re: Hunting UK weapons Inspectors, is Norman Baker an embarrassment to the Con/LD alliance?
In January this year Lord Hutton agreed to allow the doctors to see the post mortem report on David Kelly but they have not had it yet, four months later. When will Cameron/Clegg release the evidence I wonder?
Dr. Kelly article: http://www.redress.cc/global/cking20100520
The supposed CCTV of what’s the greatest terrorist act in Britain (7/7/05) and a independent public inquiry is also eagerly awaited. When will they address that I wonder?
Furthermore, that there are other ways of disrupting the execrable fox hunts; through local civic measures, protests and much else; as with a number of ‘evils’, it doesn’t necessarily require overweening state legislation in order to render it impractical/ socially unacceptable. Banning it turns the hang ’em flog ’em brigade into ‘libertarians’, which they most certainly are not! And so the High Tories have been able to masquerade as liberals and divert attention from far more pressing concerns.
lwtc247
Is Norman Baker an embarassment? Not in the least, he is deputy minister for transport – something in which you ought to rejoice.
Oh, but I forgot, you think we are all Zionists in control of Cheney/Bilderberg/Rothschild or something!
Pleased to see that men accused of rape, will now be given the same anonymity as their accusers… unless proven guilty of course.
I hope that this will be followed by the law of exposing all those proven to be false-witnesses; as well as penalising them to the same extent that the crime would have received.
The logic being, that if the sentence fits the crime, then a false-witness intends to commit a crime of ‘fitting’ magnitude.
@Suhayl – but if the examples were “emblematic”, and not comparisons per se, then given the balance of harm, surely the correct response is: banning protest is generally bad, and outlawing unusual cruelty to animals is generally good?
I just don’t see the point of the “freedom” discussed here. It is a freedom to carry on a tradition of causing huge unnecessary suffering to animals, with no significant benefits to take into account. If foxes are pests, they should be killed as painlessly as possible, which I think can only mean shooting.
Personally I rank animals by how good they taste.
What, Craig, you mean you eat foxes?
Incidentally, I had a tuna sandwich today and last night I ate a part of a chicken.
Both of these animals had been killed as part of organised systemic killing on a mass industrial scale.
Where does that place me on the morality/ ethics scale?
But I take your point, Jon. I just agree with Craig that everything that we abhor and that is bad does not necessarily require state legislation, that once you start to use the blunt machine of the state in that way, it can be a hiding to nothing.
Jon,
I agree there is a distinction – but it also seems the compulsion to make things illegal doesn’t recognise it once it sets in.
Sorry, I simply disagree. Fox-hunting belongs to a realm of pursuits whose other forms – bear-baiting, dogfighting, cock throwing – were banished long ago, in most cases, centuries ago, on the grounds of their obvious cruelty and needlessness, and in clear recognition of the fact that their mere existence is itself an indictment of the society which permits them. Fox-hunting persisted owing to privilege and class, with the handy cover of spurious arguments about countryside management in more recent times. The blood sports popular with the working classes went through exactly the same kind of vilification and stigmatisation you suggest for fox-hunting, social attitudes changed, and the result was the widely-supported decision to ban them. Fox-hunting’s adherents have simply long enjoyed the kind of privilege which allowed them to protect their own particular brand of cruelty from that same popular judgement. Banning fox-hunting isn’t illiberal, it’s progressive. I can’t connect the pattern of thought behind it to that spurring the worst of New Labour’s authoritarian policies.
As for the smoking ban, while in principle I could understand the reasoning behind smoking being permitted in what are ultimately private businesses, the ban is there to protect the staff. Without it, we would face a situation where only smokers or those strange few with absolutely no objection to the smoke could realistically apply for certain jobs, and beyond that a far worse situation where those badly in need of work are forced to put aside considerations of their own health and go to work in such an environment. The ban is a much lesser evil, I feel.
Happy to disagree, though. (He says from the obvious position of strength of the laws already both having passed, of course, but such is…)
Thank you for a wonderful post, Craig.
I have long held similar sentiments on fox hunting.
In light of your post, I may have to change my mind about the smoking ban (yuk). What other opinion might I have to rethink?