This week saw a flurry of outraged responses to a claim by fox hunting campaign group Hunting Kind that it had prepared a legal case that could see fox hunters recognised as an ethnic minority, and accordingly protected under the Equality Act (2010).
As debate has focused on what this claim means for already recognised ethnic groups, and on whether or not fox hunting can ever be considered acceptable, key questions have remained unaddressed.
Could such a bid be successful? If accepted, what rights and protections would it confer upon fox hunters? And how does it fit into a wider pattern of appropriation of victimhood?
Are fox hunters an ethnic group?
First of all, let’s examine the claim that fox hunters are an ethnic group. The decision to push for this type of protection is a curious one. One might have thought that a better case could be made for the conviction that ‘fox hunting is a public good’ should be a protected belief, as the law on belief has, in recent years, already been extended to include the convictions that Scotland should be an independent country and that gender is always in accordance with sex as defined at birth. It suggests that Hunting Kind do not think a court would consider their conviction to be substantial enough to constitute a philosophical belief.
When race was initially included in the Equality Act (2010) – and, before it, in the Race Relations Act (1965) – opponents argued that it was a legally insubstantial concept because, from a scientific perspective, race is not real. The successful counter-argument was that it is socially real – like, say, money or human rights – and therefore has an impact on people’s lives.
Ethnicity, which can focus on less immediately apparent aspect of heritage, is still more contentious, and specific ethnic groups – such as Jewish and Roma people – have been recognised in part because it can easily be demonstrated that they suffer discrimination, thereby confirming the social element.
Do fox hunters suffer discrimination?
Hunting Kind argues that they do. It claims that people have lost their jobs after being identified as fox hunters, and that they have been abused on social media. That isn’t necessarily enough to determine a need for protection under the Act, however. Crucially, the Equality Act is there to prevent discrimination on the basis of innate characteristics – to stop people from being attacked for who they are, not for what they do. Is the desire to hunt foxes an innate characteristic? The group’s best hope of substantiating this would probably be to present it as just one aspect of a more complex social identity. The likely result would be something closer to a request for legal protection for the British upper class.
What does the Equality Act do for protected groups?
If fox hunters were to be recognised as a protected minority, what would the consequences of that be? First, to be clear, it would not mean that they were allowed to hunt foxes. Disabled people can’t automatically get access adjustments made, nor can they get essential equipment paid for by the state, just because they’re defined as having a protected characteristic. Trans people can’t automatically get their gender recognised. Fox hunting would remain illegal.
Being classed as an ethnic group would indeed stop fox hunters from being sacked or denied service, in most circumstances, because of their identity or associated beliefs. If they were arrested for hunting foxes, however, it would be perfectly legitimate for them to be rejected on that basis. Just as somebody who believed in Scottish independence could be sacked for constantly bothering pro-Union colleagues about it, or somebody with the aforementioned beliefs about gender could be denied service in a shop where they harassed a trans member of staff.
It may be a bit of a wake-up call for some on the right, but protected characteristics don’t confer special rights – people who possess them are required to abide by the same rules as everyone else.
Right-wing victim narratives
If being recognised as an ethnic minority would confer such limited benefits upon members of the fox hunting community, why do they want it? Seen from an international perspective, it fits into a pattern of right-wing groups seeking to attach victim status to themselves.
This is perhaps at its most obvious when journalists with columns in multiple major newspapers claim that they have been silenced because people object to what they write on social media, but it is much more organised in other contexts.
In the US, for instance, the organisation Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) has used concern around due process to criticise campaigns for improved safety for women on college campuses, claiming that this turns male students into victims.
It has gone on from there to successfully push forward legislative amendments to end women-only scholarships, and has ended scholarships reserved for Native American and African American students in the process.
The inherent unfairness in this approach stems from the fact that some groups have a lot more power than others to begin with. Those scholarships, for instance, were developed to counter historic imbalances and support frequently excluded groups.
Around the world, equalities law is generally structured in such a way that it can be used by anyone, because it is recognised that individuals in generally advantaged categories can still be mistreated, but it also forms part of an effort to counter societal imbalances.
Spin it however you like, but while they might well be targeted with online abuse, fox hunters do not face remotely the same level of hostility and social exclusion as Roma people. There is a risk, then, that by trying to make use of equality law they may bring it into disrepute – something that would serve a wider right-wing agenda.
Whether or not Hunting Kind will succeed in its bid for recognition remains to be seen. Each case must of course be considered on its individual merits – but if, ultimately, rulings of that sort make it more difficult for the law to serve its intended purpose, that law is likely to be redrafted, and it is unlikely that fox hunters would then be high on the list of concerns.
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