Killing foxes
The politics of posh people's hobbies
Every year in Scotland, land managers must get to work controlling the deer numbers. It is a bigger task than most realise, with over 100,000 of the animals being shot yearly in culls. And yet this slaughter goes largely unremarked upon in the press: deer are a nuisance whose predators were exterminated long ago; therefore, if we do not shoot Bambi’s mother, she will munch away until the rest of the ecosystem is a barren wasteland. As such, weepy-eyed animal rights activists have largely averted their gaze from the Highlands.
Unfortunately for bloodsport fans south of the border, the Boxing Day fox hunt has not maintained similar obscurity.
Fox hunting differs slightly from deer culling in that, rather than using modern equipment to thin numbers as quickly, efficiently, and painlessly as possible, one uses a pack of dogs, a fancy outfit, a horse, and a trumpet to tear the creatures limb from limb. This is, I am told, a curious yet important inherited part of upper-class life which — much like child abuse in boarding schools — may seem perverse to outsiders but is fundamentally part of what it means to be English. Needless to say, this is not the best way of controlling fox populations and is now mostly a recreational activity. The sport was banned in 2004, but a loophole was maintained for trail hunting, meaning one can still lay a scented trail for the foxhounds to follow while you trot behind on your pony. In theory, this allows the hounds and pageantry to be maintained without fox deaths; in practice, nobody organising the hunts is particularly bothered if the dogs happen upon a real fox.
Now Labour is back in power and out of ideas, they have the English countryside in their sights, and trail hunting appears to be for the chop. I assume this is largely driven by resentment of their class enemies and a general hatred of fun. Unfortunately for the fox-hunting cavaliers, the public are quite roundheaded on this issue: only 9% of people oppose the current ban on fox hunting, and 83% do not think we should allow any recreational hunting whatsoever. Of course, it is true that negative polling itself is not a sufficient justification for the suspension of liberties. Hunting is a perfectly natural human activity, and I would be happy to let the toffs manage their shires as they see fit.
Unfortunately, this is not possible because of their association with my political faction. We do not live in a country beset by the spirit of liberalism, and any party of the Right is going to be asked about hunting foxes because the Left know it is one of the most reliable winners they have.
The last time the issue of fox hunting took on any salience during an election was in 2017 when Theresa May’s Conservatives came remarkably close to losing to an elderly communist from Islington. Key to May’s lacklustre performance was a stinker of a manifesto written by Nick Timothy and Ben Gummer. As Tim Shipman reports in Fall Out, the pair ‘barely paused to think about the inclusion of a renewed commitment’ — that is to say, to holding a vote on legalising fox hunting, a stance they had inherited from David Cameron. This is particularly striking as this manifesto was treated almost as a work of political philosophy by Timothy, yet this wildly unpopular measure was just accepted as a natural inheritance of the previous document. Being a ‘Tory’ just meant having fox hunting in your manifesto — regardless of what anyone thought of it. This promise did not prove cost-free, with the Tory candidate for Coventry South reporting that ‘…the biggest topic of conversation by far amongst these Labour-background urban voters was fox hunting, often preceded with the comment: “We never thought she would be in favour of fox hunting.”’
Over the next three or so years, the Tory party is widely expected to slowly die, with Reform supplanting it as the main party of the Right. As such, the British Right has the unusual opportunity of a clean slate, free from the electorally unpopular positions that they felt duty bound to defend in the past. The rural upper classes in Britain are not a large enough group to sustain their own political party, but in the Conservative Party they largely took the management function while the petty bourgeoisie lent them votes to keep the taxes down and the immigrants out. As such, it was their privilege to use this vehicle to defend their country sports, their private schools, their hereditary peers. None of this mattered to most of us. But if they were beating the Left, they were welcome to it.
The problem is that they are no longer delivering the goods. A group of Eton- and Oxford-educated poshos decided to take the Conservative Party and make it a vehicle not of the Right, but of the Left, imposing upon the country Net Zero, open borders, speech restrictions, anti-white and anti-male discrimination, and one of the most progressive taxation systems on earth. As a consequence, the world’s oldest political party is now collapsing, and in the Conservative Party’s place comes a party bereft of any strong association with the old Tory social structures. Reform’s vote at the last election was strongest among skilled manual labourers; today, while it is only level with the Tories amongst managerial workers, it is demolishing them by 22 points among those in social grades C2DE. Whilst the accusations of being ‘far-right’ will continue to be used to some effect by their opponents, there is effectively zero chance they can realistically be accused of being the party of the upper classes.
The raison d’être of Reform is to replace the complacent Tories with a novel force of the Right that acts on the issues which people actually care about, rather than placating the Left on all the important stuff while wasting political capital defending unpopular hobbies. It is true that Farage is a defender of fox hunting and, as he is almost the only reason Reform exists, their position on the matter is his prerogative. It seems reasonable that a program of right-wing government would slip in legalisation of the hunt, without much fuss, during an avalanche of other policies to satisfy the base. But it would be best if we did not delude ourselves that anyone wants to hear about the well-off massacring cute, fluffy animals.
This article was written by Scott Goetz, our deputy editor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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The most pressing example of animal cruelty is Halal Slaughter of livestock. It must be outlawed forthwith. No importation of meat derived from such a barbaric practice should be permitted either.
Apart from confusing being posh with living in the countryside you are broadly correct that there’s little mileage in defending fox hunting as a political act.
It won’t be long before they come after fishing, after they have banned shooting.