407,791 voices cry freedom - Largest UK protest march in history

The Liberty and Livelihood March through London was the biggest civil liberty protest in British history. Stephen Robinson reports.

It started so quietly that at first one wondered if it was all going to be an embarrassing flop. At 7am yesterday the only people visible on the streets of central London were hundreds of police, closing roads and putting up tape and barriers.

In the clubs of St James's, unusually full for a weekend, the grander marchers breakfasted heartily.

Some way away at the mainline railway stations, chartered trains were hauling the countryside to the town, and under the streets the marchers were making their way by Tube to the mustering points for the two marches, at Blackfriars for Livelihood, Hyde Park for Liberty, depending on where you had travelled from.

But early on the mobilisation was invisible to most Londoners, and it was only when you walked down Park Lane to the starting point of the Liberty march in Hyde Park that the sheer scale of the event became obvious.

One minute it seemed like another late summer Sunday in London; the next the huge banks of people came into view, backed deeply into the normally vacant green acres of the park.

There was a palpable sense of excitement that something big was afoot. Most of the crowd queued for three or four hours before they could actually begin their march.

At the head of the Liberty march, a couple of activists from the Union of Country Sports Workers, loudly denouncing the Countryside Alliance "and their establishment friends", demanded to march at the front of the Liberty rally, but the alliance's press officers wanted cute 12-month-old Sophie Large in her pushchair, with her camera-friendly placard: "When I grow up I want to go hunting with my Daddy."

The placards, swaying in the sunshine, conveyed an attitude of defiance. "We will not be culturally cleansed", read one; "Future Criminal" read another carried by an eight-year-old; "Revolting Peasant" another, carried by an adult, dressed in the Sloane Ranger's weekend uniform of plum-coloured corduroys.

Then, at precisely 10am, with whistles, horns and bagpipes blaring, the Liberty march began to roll from the eastern corner of Hyde Park, and into Piccadilly.

Kate Hoey, the Labour MP and darling for many of the marchers for her brave and lonely stance within her party, stood at the front, alongside Richard Burge, the alliance's chief executive.

Mr Burge held his hands aloft, clapping the supporters who lined the route, in the way a footballer extravagantly applauds the terraces as he leaves the pitch, to show he is not cross about being substituted. One placard read: "Hoey for Prime Minister".

The crowd eased forward at about half normal walking pace, into Piccadilly and past the Ritz where Londoners lined the pavement, shouting their support.

The marchers cheered one placard at the Ritz: "Kiwis Support Country Poms", carried by John Falloon, a New Zealand farmer visiting friends in England. Hunting is popular in New Zealand, and Mr Falloon said he worried that a ban in Britain might have a knock-on effect in his country.

As the giant procession snaked rightwards into St James's, the gentleman's clubs had all opened up. At Boodle's, the staff stood on the first floor balcony in their waiter's uniforms, quitely applauding the marchers.

The marchers loved that touch. Most of the the upmarket St James's traders were closed, but they had left banners of encouragement in their windows.

On surged the crowd, down Pall Mall, and into Trafalgar Square, where Mayor Ken Livingstone, no friend of the countryside or hunting, had left his mark.

The road narrowed into an uncomfortable funnel because of the continuing roadworks, forcing the marchers to furl their giant Liberty & Livelihood banner, as they eased around the construction equipment of the mayor's half-finished pedestrianisation scheme.

The Liberty march turned into Whitehall where - with immaculate timing - it merged with the Livelihood march which had been making its way over from its eastern starting point.

There were whistles and cheers and shouts of recognition as these two tributaries met in the middle of Whitehall to form a giant river of humanity heading towards the Cenotaph, where the marchers fell silent as a mark of respect.

This meant the marchers could not shout their true feelings towards Downing Street, which was just as well as the mood was specifically hostile to the Prime Minister. One man, dressed as the grim reaper with a Tony Blair mask, was wildly cheered.

If the well-heeled of St James's were sending their best wishes, the tone of the march was not at all grand. Early yesterday, a presenter on Radio Five Live put on a jokey posh accent as he spoke to a reporter in Hyde Park, perhaps to convey the BBC's general disdain for the event.

The presenter should have spoken to Mike Idle and Ewan Gaskell, keen members of the Ullswater fell pack, whose Cumbrian accents were so thick they warned "you might need an interpreter to interview us".

Both had been to London only twice before, to attend the previous countryside marches, and they were in no hurry to come back.

They said they were incensed that the media always suggested hunting was for rich people on horseback. "There are no toffs in our hunt," said Mr Gaskell, a van driver, rather giving the impression that they would not be welcome there.

"And I'll tell you now, we're not going to stop because of what Blair says. How are they going to stop it? They don't police the towns in Cumbria, so how will they police the hunts?" There was a definite edge of defiance on the streets.

From a different perspective, Richard Fry, who owns a business in London and a farm in Dorset, had brought his family, along with another 1,000 or so supporters of the Cattistock Hunt.

"Make no mistake," he said, "this one is the last peaceful march I'm coming on. If they press on with a ban now, the gloves will really come off."

Past the Cenotaph, the Liberty and Livelihood marches, still separated by metal barriers, surged together towards the finishing line at the foot of Whitehall, where the marchers were counted by tellers.

To the delight of all, their final steps over the counting line were captured by video cameras and the images projected on giant screens above Whitehall.

They could see the tally constantly rising on the digital counter so they had a sense of contributing, personally, to the final total.

Perhaps a hundred anti-hunting protestors had gathered in Parliament Square, yelling abuse and banging drums, but there was no trouble, and the marchers seemed more bemused than offended by the occasional shouts of "Go home, scum".

In the square, the marches again separated, with Livelihood heading south over Westminster Bridge, and Liberty petering out amid the dreary office blocks of Victoria Street.

There were no speeches, no rally, no concert to raise the spirits before the long journey home. Once they had passed the counting station, the marchers were asked simply to disperse to allow those behind to complete the route.

The very spareness of the march somehow added to its power. Some 400,000 people came to London from all over the country to tramp along the streets, and simply be counted.

The walk took a good two hours, and the wait could be double that. No gift packs were offered to the children, no jugglers or clowns along the way, no computer games to take home - just long journeys by coach or train, and a long, tiring, march, and aching bones.

"It was brilliant, brilliant," said Daisy Walker, 12. She was there with her parents, Sean and Karen, north Londoners who carry no candle for hunting - Daisy strongly disapproves of it as well - yet adamant that they should support the countryside.

To be on the streets yesterday was to feel you were part of something much larger even than the important issues that had drawn the masses to the capital.

As hard as a BBC presenter might try, you could not generalise about these people. No cosy British social snobbery or inverted snobbery helps you out, for the crowds were so socially and geograpically diverse.

So, too, were the issues that brought them together. For every marcher talking about hunting, there was another telling you about the local bus service, the closing Post Office, the price of lamb, and the greed of the supermarkets.

One of the last banners read: "Mr Blair, see what a minority looks like." This was a pretty good joke when 200,000 were expected, but became better still when more than double that figure turned up.

The only question now is whether Mr Blair still treats those hundreds of thousands of people as an irrelevant minority, or accepts that this time, the countryside really has spoken.

Prince Charles tells Blair: 'Farmers are being treated worse than blacks or gays'
By Josie Clarke
(Filed: 22/09/2002)

The Prince of Wales has written to Tony Blair to say that he agrees with farmers who believe that they are victimised more than "blacks or gays".


	The Prince openly supports hunting

In an impassioned intervention on behalf of the countryside, Prince Charles told the Prime Minister that he agreed with a farmer in Cumbria who told him that "if we, as a group, were black or gay, we would not be victimised or picked upon".

In the letter, which was written earlier this year, the future monarch said that if country folk were "any other minority" the government would make greater efforts to protect them. He went on to blame the Government for "destroying the countryside".

Aides said Prince Charles wrote the letter after meeting Mr Blair. The Prime Minister is not thought to have responded directly.

The disclosure of the intervention will hearten the 300,000 people expected to attend today's Liberty and Livelihood march on London organised by the Countryside Alliance. The protest is aimed at demonstrating opposition to a ban on foxhunting and to defend the rural way of life.

The Prince openly supports hunting, although neither he nor Camilla Parker Bowles, his companion, will attend today's protest. He has, however, given staff at his Highgrove estate and at his Duchy of Cornwall estate leave to attend the march.

A spokeswoman for Prince Charles said: "The Prince may well have written to the Prime Minister about fox hunting." A Downing Street spokesman said: "We never comment on any private correspondence between the Prime Minister and members of the Royal Family. The Government continues to govern for the whole country, urban and rural alike."

Prince Charles has said that he will cease hunting if a ban becomes law, but a friend is reported to have said: "He thinks there is a lack of understanding from the Government about the real issues in the countryside."

I am marching today in defence of our freedom
By Iain Duncan Smith
(Filed: 22/09/2002)

I will be joining the countryside march today to make a statement about the Britain I want to live in. I want to live in a society where diversity and pluralism flourish, where people respect the rights of others to live their lives differently, even in a way that some might find distasteful.

What I don't want is to live in a society where the law is used to suppress the liberty of those regarded by the majority as the wrong colour or religion, the wrong tribe or race, or advocates of the "wrong" way to live. In short, I want to live in a free country.

By marching through our capital, I will be celebrating the diversity and pluralism of Britain, a country not just of cities and towns, but of hills and uplands, village schools and village shops; and yes, of fox-hunters and fox-hounds.

Above all, I will be marching for freedom - the freedom of people in the countryside to live their lives according to their choices and traditions, instead of according to the whims of a distant and disdainful Government.

Thousands will march, drawn from towns, villages and cities across the land, from across party lines and from every social class.

Each will have their different reasons for attending, many to preserve hunting, others to show their solidarity with people whose way of life is under threat. Whatever their circumstances, they will march as one, to march against the imposition of a monoculture, to march for tolerance.

Historically, despite the profound differences between the urban and rural way of life wrought by the industrial revolution, town and country have coexisted in mutual respect.

The urban majority may not have always understood the traditions of the countryside, but they were prepared to live and let live. But now this bond is under threat. Those who govern are no longer prepared to live and let live.

They want to regulate every aspect of country life, to control and interfere without so much as a thought to the consequences.

I believe that one of the inevitable consequences of over-regulation is to set the regulator against the regulated, to breed confrontation instead of co-operation. That is why we now see the mutual respect between town and country breaking down.

A clash of cultures is emerging where ignorance and prejudice come to the fore, rather than the understanding that to preserve our country we must preserve our respect for the way others live.

Respect for the balance of nature is the key to understanding the countryside. Behind its often beautiful facade, nature can be unforgiving: pests are controlled, livestock is bred and slaughtered, animals perish in the elements.

This is all necessary to preserve the order on which a prosperous and living countryside depends. If we regulate the hardship out of our countryside, we will end up with a theme-park, not a living environment.

Agriculture will be reduced to mass production, as it is in the United States. It is all a far cry from the gentle interweaving of farms, landscape and community that is the key to the British countryside.

Hunting is part and parcel of this natural order. It is an ancient part of our compact with the balance of nature and is viewed as such by the vast majority of country people. Yes, there is a ceremony to hunting, but it isn't based on ritualised cruelty as its critics claim.

If hunting were cruel, the inquiry chaired by Lord Burns would have concluded so. Instead it found that the implications of hunting for animal welfare were no worse than shooting or gassing. I believe that hunting is an issue of liberty. I am proud to march for liberty. It is the most important right of all.

In stating this position I recognise that many people, including some Conservatives, think differently. They too hold strong and principled views.

This is why hunting remains an issue where MPs must be free to vote according to their conscience rather than a party line.

However, just as the current Government has given parliamentary time for a Private Member's Bill to ban hunting, so a future Conservative government would offer parliamentary time and a free vote for any Private Member's Bill that sought to overturn or modify a ban if it were introduced.

Because of the polarisation of opinion over hunting, some have proposed a "middle way" that preserves hunting in a regulated form.

Attractive as that may be to some if the alternative is complete abolition, I remain unconvinced that it wouldn't lead to abolition by the back door. What we seek today is the liberty to carry on traditional ways, not a licence to hunt under the Government's sufferance.

But this march is about more than hunting. It is about standing up for a prosperous, working countryside instead of the perpetual crisis seen in rural Britain over the last five years. It is a deep, numbing crisis illustrated by one stark statistic above all.

Suicides among farmers currently stand at 59 a year. In other words, every week another farmer concludes that there is no future in farming, and consequently, no future for them.

Nothing could show so clearly how farming is so much more than just a job to those who farm, it is a way of life. For those who earn their living on the land, livelihood is life.

It is not difficult to see the roots of this despair. The average UK farmer earned just £10,000 for the financial year to February 2002, way below the minimum wage.

The knife in the wound was twisted with the tragedy of foot and mouth and the Government's incompetent attempts to tackle the disease.

Even when the full extent of the crisis became apparent, it was clear to those in the countryside that there were other priorities in the corridors of power ahead of tackling the disease competently and effectively.

The farming crisis is at the heart of troubled times across rural Britain. Services are under threat, with sub-post offices, pubs and village schools disappearing from rural communities. As in the rest of Britain, rural crime is rising.

What is the best the Government can do when so many country people live in fear of crime? It threatens to make thousands of them criminals by making a way of life illegal.

The only thing that can stop that outcome is for those who object to make their case forcefully, but peacefully.

For those unfamiliar with countryside campaigning, let me assure them that the march is a show of strength to make a fair and reasonable case, not a call for confrontation. Marchers are appealing for understanding, tolerance and help.

Britain should be a place where communities tolerate one another's differences, where we celebrate freedom by respecting the way others live their lives. Today I am marching not just for the countryside, but for the kind of country I want to live in.


	News: Prince Charles tells Blair: 'Farmers are being treated worse than blacks or gays'

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	Whitehall is swamped as 400,000 countryside marchers converge on Parliament Square