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BARNARD CASTLE, England - George Bernard Shaw famously said that it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. Shaw was making a point about accents and status, but he could as easily have been talking about fox hunting. Whenever an Englishman - or Englishwoman, for that matter - mentions fox hunting, the atmosphere is likely to become downright combustible.
Britons are divided over the (not yet located) weapons of mass destruction and the government's "sexed-up dossier." But no argument over the war in Iraq ever gets as passionate, as loud, or as potentially violent as one over the rights and wrongs of chasing down a mammal of the genus vulpes with mammals of the genus canis familiaris followed by homo sapiens riding on equus caballus. This isn't just a fight over whether fox hunting is the necessary culling of a heartless menace to the farmyard or the cruel pastime of chinless toffs in red coats and shiny boots. It pits the rural against the urban, the traditional against the "modern," Little England against Big Europe, one flavor of animal lover against another flavor of animal lover. If you stop in at the Rose and Crown for a pint of Old Peculiar and the issue comes up, take cover.
The Labor Party has been planning to limit or ban fox hunting since their landslide victory in 1997. Hunting is considered a moral issue (like abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia) so Prime Minister Tony Blair promised a "free vote" in the House of Commons - that is, a vote where the party whips don't get heavy with the members. In July, Parliament finally acted. It's not the bill Blair wanted: His legislation would have allowed a few "licensed" hunts, a compromise that had a chance to make it out of the House of Lords unscathed. But Labor MPs had been waiting for a long time to show the Tories, traditionally the party of the landed gentry, who's boss. They passed a bill that would end fox hunting - no ifs, ands or buts. The Lords have let it be known they will either amend the bill or kill it. The Labor hard core insist that their version of the legislation should stand and want to invoke a rarely used maneuver called the Parliament Act, which allows the Commons to overrule the Lords.
The satirical magazine Private Eye recently conflated the fight over foxes and the doubts over the Iraqi threat into one faux news story: "The Prime Minister has today announced a new bill to ban the traditional English pursuit of "hunting for facts.' He told reporters, "Fact hunting is nothing more than an opportunity for a tiny minority of privileged people to go around the country looking for blood.' He continued, "They are not really interested in facts, all they want to do is hound innocent creatures like myself to death.' " This is fixing to get ugly. The last time it looked like fox hunting was about to join bear-baiting and jousting in the dustbin of sporting history, more than 250,000 people marched on London.
A clash of cherished mythologies looms: the union chapel working class lads of Labor versus the plummy-voiced squires of the Conservative Party. Only it's not that simple. Some of fox hunting's most vocal supporters, such as Baroness Mallalieu, are not hereditary peers (now a minority in the House of Lords) but Labor appointees. And while the Labor Party faithful still want to portray hunters as sadistic dukes crashing though tranquil fields on blood mares to watch their baying hounds rip a poor fluffy-tailed fox to shreds, most people who go fox hunting are untitled farmers and riding enthusiasts. Here in Barnard Castle, a small market town in an agricultural area in the north of England, many local people are Labor voters but also support the Countryside Alliance, the outfit that sponsored the big London protest. These tractor-driving, animal-loving citizens feel ignored by the Blair government, as if the country is less important than the town, as if they are yokels too dumb to move to London where you can get decent sushi.
The fight over fox hunting isn't simply a political or even philosophical disagreement, but an aspect of a fundamental question of national identity: Who do the British think they are? Most of the population of the island now live in cities and towns, yet feel a romantic, almost atavistic attachment to the green hills and valleys where it is, frankly, hard to make a living, and decent sushi is in short supply. Fox hunting is something they know only from colored engravings hanging in the pub or movies about the upper classes. They are torn: On the one hand, fox hunting is a bloody business and if the real point is varmint control, surely you should just shoot the fox, not get dressed up and ride horses. On the other, it is a quintessentially English sport (fox hunting is less prevalent in Scotland and Wales). On the one hand, foxes are beautiful creatures who've a right to survive, and on the other, the half-eaten carcasses after a vulpine raid aren't pretty; foxes are not vegetarians.
The next general election will probably be in 2005. There are dozens of people here in Barnard Castle, most of whom have never ridden to hounds, who will protest again if hunting is banned. The Countryside Alliance has promised to mobilize the shires, highlighting the divide between urban and rural, threatening Labor's huge majority in a number of marginal rural seats. The cunning fox may raid the governmental henhouse Tony Blair thought was so safe.