Liberty and livelihood

John Jackson (London, Mishcon de Reya): Last week the Appeal Court handed down a very important judgement settling a question about the Hunting Act. The Act provides that no offence is committed if hunting is done in a way which brings it within one of a number of exemptions laid down in the Act. Astonishingly, the  authorities had argued that they had little chance of  bringing successful prosecutions if they were asked to prove that challenged hunting was not within the exemptions. They wanted the court to rule that it was up to the accused to prove that what was done was lawful. To rule, in other words, that the accused would be found guilty unless innocence could be proved. The court rejected the prosecutors' request.

The right to be held innocent unless and until proved to be guilty - the presumption of innocence - is one of our ancient and fundamental freedoms On 28 February in London, and in meetings being organised across the country, the Convention on Modern Liberty will deliberate on the many perceived, and growing,  threats to all the fundamental rights we have fought for and enjoyed as a free people.

Determined to spread the influence and relevance of the Convention, its  organisers were delighted to announce that both the TUC, which passed a pioneering motion against the rise of the Database State at its last Congress, and the Countryside Alliance were participating in it.

This stirred the ‘usual questions' and an exchange on the right of the Countryside Alliance to be one of more than forty of the Convention's growing number of partner organisations took place. I support the Convention, strongly. I also played a role in creating  the Alliance of which I was a leader in its early years. It is helpful, I think, for ‘urban' people, the vast majority of our population,  to understand the strength and breadth of the forces that lay behind the ‘countryside movement' and provided the basis for its ongoing influence.

In September 2002 some 500,000 ‘ordinary' people, of all party political persuasions, marched in London under the banner of Liberty and Livelihood. In the popular mind this event, the third of its kind in London organised by the Countryside Alliance, was primarily a protest against the parliamentary attempt to ban hunting. But whilst most of the marchers came from the countryside, less than one tenth of them were, or ever had been, involved directly in hunting. And of the ten grievances for which remedy was sort in the petition delivered to Downing St after the march only one related to hunting - a point much of the press missed. As a proportion of the population, it was, by far, the largest incursion into London in support of a rural cause since the Peasants Revolt of 1381 - over six centuries earlier.

The two events - the March and the Revolt  - were linked by the call on the marchers' banner. Liberty is not, in any meaningful sense, enjoyable without livelihood. And livelihood (particularly when its meaning is taken to embrace Thomas Jefferson's  ‘happiness') without liberty is mere servitude. Neither is of much value without the other.

The so-called peasants of 1381, mainly feudal serfs, were enjoying better economic livelihood flowing from their ability to demand higher wages - following the Black Death, there were fewer of them to do the same amount of work. But, despite the promises in the much vaunted Great Charter (Magna Carta, by then a century and a half old), they were enjoying little  liberty. The spark which started the uprising was an attempt to impose a poll tax. But the fundamental cause, which terrified other European feudal regimes, was a demand for basic freedoms to go with the improvement in livelihood. Sadly, the revolt was suppressed with considerable brutality and an authoritarian foot was placed firmly on its  fuel line by the imposition of a mediaeval form of wage control.

In the case of the marchers of 2002, they were enjoying the liberty their forbears had attempted to gain. But, as they perceived their situation, their livelihood, based on the sustainability of the rural economy and rural communities was being whittled away. And the whittling knife was in the hands of powerful (Westminster based) politicians whose careers depended on the votes of an urban population with little understanding of, or interest in, rural affairs.

The resentment engendered by this had built over the years as rural schools were closed, rural transport reduced, village shops and the smaller farms vanished, housing became unaffordable and the migration of the rural young to the towns accelerated. Politically the countryside became tinder dry and the spark which started the conflagration this time was the attack on hunting. This became  symbolic of what was seen by the rural community and their sympathisers as reflecting both a dislike of a rural way of life  and, particularly, a sustained assault on the livelihood of the rural minority by the urban majority. An urban majority which did not appreciate that there would be no countryside for all to enjoy unless there was livelihood for those who lived in it.

Sadly there is still little sign  that there is wide recognition of this obvious point. Nor of the point  that the countryside is right to continue its protest and to demand that it be heard.

If that right is not exercised and the rest of us do not hear,  there are two risks. Firstly that a sustainable countryside will be destroyed completely (not by suppression but by being ignored) to the loss of all of us. Secondly that we will damage seriously our  understanding of liberty in our country and what that means for the way in which our majorities deal with  our minorities.

No minority in any community has the moral right to stand out against and be protected from the consequences of change resulting from economic and social pressures which are to the demonstrable benefit of the community as a whole. Our liberties can be enjoyed collectively as well as individually. And with those  liberties run collective and individual responsibilities. We all have a duty to adapt and no minority is excused that duty.

But the majority has in its turn a duty to exercise its liberties in a way that assists with that process of adaptation, particularly by positive and sensitive social, structural and economic measures. That is a proper use of liberty by those in the majority, for communal as well as individual benefit.

Coal mining was a huge rural industry and it was right that it yielded, finally, to the pressure for economic efficiency. But there would be fewer scars affecting some of our attitudes today if more care had been taken (perhaps by other parts of the rural community) to heed the needs of those mining villages in the countryside whose livelihood in every sense was about to be destroyed with the disappearance of their local pit.

Two of the biggest threats to liberty are that its use (particularly by minorities) is defended or attacked on unreasonable grounds and, arguably more importantly, that it is used carelessly by those with secure livelihood who have insufficient regard for the needs of those without. That is why liberty and livelihood must be understood as inseparable companions that have marched together throughout the long history of fragile human freedoms. Their banner must continue to be held high, not only by the countryside but by all of us.