Major Acid's E-Rag
It Strikes Me...
I can Hear the Foxes Laughing
In some future classroom the debate will rage. Well, rage may be too
strong a word. Fifty or a hundred years from now debates involving fox
hunting are likely to be tame compared to the noise they generate in
Britain today. The focus of those future debates won’t be the hunting
itself, though; it will be whether or not the legal battle over fox
hunting can be pinpointed as the historical moment that removed culture
from the previously invulnerable shield of “human rights.”
Defenders of the fox hunt claim it is part of British cultural heritage.
Banning hunters from pursuing their centuries old tradition, they claim,
violates their human rights. Those who scoff at such an argument are
reminded that it is a strikingly similar argument that Canadian courts
accepted in ruling that Native Canadians can hunt and fish whenever they
feel like it. It is a similar argument that allowed Native Americans to
ceremonially paddle canoes out to an unsuspecting whale and butcher it
on the coast of Washington State in the name of traditional rights.
It is the same argument that underlies the African Charter, a document
which specifically states that community – and the culture that defines
the community – has “human” rights, and that those rights may trump an
individual’s human rights.
Yet, when the disadvantaged feel that some cultural aspect is offensive,
they also feel quite free to demand that the culture that spawned that
aspect change. So it is that a Confederate flag, for example, is flown
today in the United States only in Civil War re-enactments, Hollywood
films, and the occasional government building in the southern US, this
last one only until the inevitable hue and cry succeeds in taking it
down. The white and presumably advantaged culture must bow to the
sensitivities of disadvantaged black culture.
In this way, too, the British fox hunt is reflective of wider concerns.
Those concerns are presented in the guise of animal rights, but more
importantly supporters of the ban evidence a clear “eat the rich”
attitude. The advantaged, it seems, in this case the British upper
class, don’t have cultural rights. In Scotland, the battle was cast as
poor, colonized Scottish subjects taking a swipe at their privileged
British overlords. In Scotland, fox hunting is already banned.
Yet imagine the howls of outrage if the situation were reversed, if
darts, say, was banned from pubs across England on the entirely
reasonable grounds that it is a safety hazard to let drunken louts throw
steel-pointed missiles around at will. That would be the rich taking
away a cultural heritage of the poor, and it wouldn’t survive a single
day in public debate.
If killing whales in a Native ceremony, or throwing darts in a smoky
(for how long?) pub seem somehow different than fox hunting, think
again. The battle over the ban will go to the courts, and since it
involves, in the public mind, the stripping away of a privilege of the
rich, the inevitable trials will be mass media circuses.
Still think this is a trivial thing? Think again (again). The
initiative has been stalled in government debate for years, routinely
defeated by (surprise) The House of Lords, so to solve this pressing
legislative issue, Tony Blair’s government resorted to something called
the Parliament Act , a procedural method only used three other times
since it became available in 1949. Using this tool, the British House of
Commons simply chose to ignore the House of Lords. In 55 years, only
three other issues were so compelling to the governments of the day that
the Parliament Act was invoked.
The Parliament Act was used to pass The War Crimes Act 1991, extending
British court jurisdiction to cover Nazi war crimes from WW II; the
European Parliamentary Elections Act 1999, to amend the system of
elections to European Parliament; and the Sexual Offenses (Amended) Act
2000, which equalized the age of consent for sexual relations so that it
is the same for heterosexual, lesbian and homosexual persons.
Banning fox hunting is the fourth use. If somehow it seems less weighty
an issue than any of the others above, that is a mistake. If the use of
the Act and the resulting ban succeed (and I suspect they will,
eventually) then they will unwittingly have set a precedent allowing
government to do away with cultural heritage effectively by fiat. They
will have established in law that culture is not inviolable; that
tradition, even one measured in centuries – and by extension in
millennia – is not inviolable; that progress, however defined, can
demand an end to the tyranny of tradition and cultural rights.
Whale hunting American natives may not be worried. Americans have little
concern for British law. Canadians, on the other hand, are still in many
ways connected to our one-time British overlords, and British legal
precedent may well find followers in Canada. At the least, it will get
creative lawyers thinking, which is always a troubling thing.
Ponder, for example, Canada’s Metis, considered an aboriginal people in
most circles. Yet fox hunting as a cultural practice is literally
hundreds of years older than the appearance of the first Metis.
The Metis, whale hunting Washington State natives, drunken dart tossing
louts, should all beware. They face a future in which culture and
tradition are no longer invulnerable shields against change. And
although guessing the future is a chump’s game, no doubt somewhere in
the future a group of academics will be spending their days arguing when
the first crack in the shield of cultural rights really appeared. Some
will argue, convincingly, I suspect, that the historical moment was the
fox hunting battle.
Meanwhile, we can enjoy the irony of it all – that those deciding the
fate of a centuries old tradition will be barristers and judges sporting
wigs and robes that themselves reflect the centuries old tradition of
British jurisprudence.
1. The Parliament Act in fact
refers to two separate acts of the same name, the first from 1911 and
the second in 1949, which amended the original. Both were used to
restrict powers of the House of Lords.
