Foxed by a question of tolerance

JOHN GUMMER
FASHION MAKES fools of us all. The most obviously irrational behaviour becomes acceptable if it can be seen to be all the rage. As parents we should take heart that, confined to gothic make-up, ghoulish clothes, spikey hair, and thumping music, there's not too much harm done. Yet when fashion turns morality on its head it is far more serious.
Nowhere more so than when it affects those who govern us. I once watched a whole group of politically correct women MPs turn up to vote on successive Fridays in the House of Commons. On the first they marched into the lobbies in favour of killing babies and on the second the same crew voted to protect foxes!
Evidently among the trendy, it is perfectly reasonable for one to kill a child even just before it is born yet it is wholly objectionable to hunt a fox even though it will otherwise have to be shot or gassed. In our culture where fashion is driven by urban attitudes, it doesn't hurt to take up moral stances about rural sports but protesting the unborn child can be extremely inconvenient. So moral stands are not determined by any system of values, any theological or philosophical rigour. Instead they are the product of fashion essentially superficial and easy.
Sadly the trivial thought processes which produce the tenets of fashionable morality also result in a deeply unworthy view of the nature of tolerance. Last week we saw Tony Blair tell 10,000 protesters from the countryside that he was not prepared to tolerate their traditional sports.
Only a day or two earlier he had told the Gay Pride march on Clapham Common that he was determined to insist that we all tolerate their chosen sexual expression. Now I don't disagree with that last judgment.
But why is it that the large number of people who fmd such behaviour deeply offensive should be encouraged to be tolerant while those who hate hunting are encouraged to be so intolerant that they want to make it a criminal offence? I DON'T MUCH like ritual slaughter or the way that halal meat is
prepared, but toleration demands that I respect the traditions of Jews and Moslems even though I think them cruel. Indeed, when I was Minister of Agriculture, I confirmed their right to continue their traditional ways of killing animals. After all, tolera
tion is not about allowing people to do things you don't much care about. that is mere apathy. Toleration is about respecting people's right to do what you would never do yourself.
So last Thursday I was out there with all those thousands who had come up from the country to protest. I don't want a nation so dominated by urban attitudes that there is no place for rural insights. Townspeople are often wholly removed from the realities of life and certainly from the realities of life in the countryside. Foxes are predators. They kill even when they have no need to eat. Anyone who has seen a chicken-run after the fox has got in will know what wanton killing is. Man too is a predator and has a role in keeping the balance of nature. He has a duty to fulfil that role.
Most of those opposed to fox-hunting accept that we shall still need to kill foxes. Their real objection to hunting is not moral. What they really dislike is the fact that the hunters enjoy the chase. Well, in a tolerant society that is a matter for them. Britain would be a meaner, less decent place if we let today's majority stop a way of life that men and women have enjoyed for centuries.
Intolerance grows whenever it is fed. We must see that we do not whet its appetite or it won't just be hunters who'll be outlawed.