On travellers and trail hunting

In the words of Thomas Sowell, “What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture — and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.”  

The favoured mantra of the left is that diversity is our strength. They believe all cultural difference is to be celebrated. The more uncomfortable that cultural difference makes us, the greater opportunity to espouse their elite credentials by tolerating it. But this generosity of spirit is not extended to our own cultural inheritance. The permissiveness they extend to minority cultures is matched only by the disdain in which they hold our own. 

I represent a semi-rural seat where this truth is exemplified in two issues: traveller developments and trail hunting. In my green and pleasant Home County, we are increasingly blighted by illegal traveller development. Overnight, often on a Bank Holiday Weekend, hedgerows are pulled up, gravel laid, and caravans roll in, in a now depressingly regular pattern. The state is seemingly powerless to block or punish these lawbreakers. Not so for my law-abiding residents who want to build a conservatory or a shed, who frequently wait years for planning permission only for their request to be rejected.  

As Kemi Badenoch has set out, part of the problem is the Public Sector Equality Duty and part of it is the ECHR, both of which have injected the legal heebie jeebies into all of our public sector bodies. Terrified of being called racist, they are failing to act on obvious wrongdoing committed by minorities. In fact, many feel that acquiescence is part of their legal duty to promote minority groups. 

We saw this in the West Midlands Police’s approach to the Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Aston Villa football match. Rather than ensure all fans could attend the game, the local police force caved into demands from Muslim vigilantes and banned Israeli Jewish fans from attending.For years the grooming gangs were not tackled because local authorities were scared of tarring the Pakistani Muslim men who were the predominant perpetrators. Health academics have argued in the British Medical Journal that female genital mutilation is just a difference in cultural practice that we should stop demonising. 

If any of this had come from the majority White British community — the request to ban Jews, the systematic sexual assault or mutilation of young girls, the repeated trampling over planning laws — the state would not have hesitated to shut it down. 

This is not equality. By treating minority cultures as more worthy, the state is in fact enshrining inequality and creating a breeding ground for resentment.  

The principle of tolerance has morphed into something much more dangerous

It is from Western civilization that the very idea of respecting other cultures arose. However, the principle of tolerance has morphed into something much more dangerous. Something which privileges minorities over the majority, which wilfully emphasises our differences and eschews assimilation.  

What else could explain why the law requires planning authorities to make provisions for travellers’ caravans, but not for churches, village halls, cricket pavilions or football pitches? 

Nowhere is the different approach to our cultural inheritance starker than in the Left’s hatred of trail hunting.  

Whilst so-called progressives will bend over backwards to defend burqas, cousin marriage and gender segregation, they have just finished a consultation on ending this centuries-old countryside tradition. 

Hunting is woven into the rhythms of rural life. The famous red jackets inspired some of our great art and literature such as Trollope, Hardy and Stubbs. It shaped our landscape. Some of our most loved London parks — Richmond Park, Hyde Park, Greenwich Park, St James’s Park — were created not by urban planners, but for royal hunts. Some of our best-known forests — New Forest, Epping Forest, Sherwood Forest — exist today because royal hunting laws protected their trees from being felled.  

Fox hunting has already been outlawed, but its modern successor, trail hunting using scent rather than animals to simulate the chase, now faces being banned by those who claim that it sometimes veers into being what it once was.  

Where was the effort to preserve the practice? To finesse enforcement? Where are the academics and campaigners who rail against any other attempt to suppress a tradition or custom? Where are the arguments that this is a cultural difference within our rural communities that we should tolerate? The solicitude offered to virtually any other minority group is absent. Why?  It is hard to draw any other conclusion but this: all other cultures are presumed innocent until proven guilty; our own is guilty until proven innocent. 

Culture is not something you can acquire from a history book, nor can it be rebuilt once it has been dismantled. The living traditions are our connection with the past, our way of honouring its dead, and passing on the gifts that we have received. Our institutions seem to understand this for all other cultures but our own. But the culture of the English countryside is as real, as inherited, and as deserving of care as any other. 

The Cultural and Integration Commission that Kemi Badenoch launched earlier this year will report back before our party’s conference in October. It is one of the most important pieces of work we can do.  

If we cannot bring ourselves to defend our own cultural inheritance, then we will soon find ourselves unable to justify our own continuance. If every inherited practice is treated as a problem to be solved, and every foreign custom as a treasure to be preserved, then inevitably our civilisation will decline.