The best definition of populist government, I think, is passing laws you know won’t work, to solve a problem that you don’t really think exists, because it polls well.
Both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak, in part because they share an essential “ideal son-in-law” energy, are often presented as having, if not vanquished populism, at least put the disease into remission. Yet one of the UK’s most far-reaching bits of populist legislation has passed the House of Commons under Sunak’s premiership and with the full support of the leader of the opposition.
The hunting trophies (import prohibition) bill may yet come unstuck in the House of Lords, though this is a rare populist measure with plenty of champions in the UK’s unelected second chamber. The bill would ban people from bringing hunting trophies — lion pelts, zebra hide, warthog tusks and the like — into Britain.
It has been criticised by conservationists in Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia, who point out that the money raised by big game hunting funds conservation, and that in the absence of people willing to cull animal populations for pleasure, they will have to turn to those willing to do it for profit. Contrary to the world as depicted in Disney cartoons, lions and elephants do not hang around the Savannah singing songs and re-enacting Hamlet. They kill people and destroy farmland, and someone — whether an orthodontist from Surrey or a farmer in Zambia’s Copperbelt — will have to shoot the occasional lion.
Yet the legislation is near certain to pass, despite the many questions over whether it will achieve its stated aims: protecting endangered wildlife and encouraging conservation.
Like most populist measures, it is slap-bang in the middle of the electorate’s prejudices and preferences. In a British context, that means appealing to a country that will do anything to help animal welfare, other than stop eating them.
Added to that is an old-fashioned dose of British class war: hunting animals for sport is something posh people do, and the Conservatives, particularly after a series of scare stories about animal rights post-Brexit did them so much damage in 2017, will seize an opportunity to make a draconian gesture in this direction. Thus, you have the coalition for a bill whose ability to tackle trophy hunting is uncertain, enforced by a country whose own ban on fox hunting is essentially only policed by saboteurs. Very few of the MPs who nodded the bill through would support even something comparatively easy, like meat-free Mondays across parliament’s canteens.
After the bill becomes law, a British connoisseur will still be able to chow down on buffalo meat, zebra mince or a side of impala: they just won’t be able to display the horns of one they had shot, and that will come at great cost to conservationist efforts.
The law reflects a prejudice held not just in the UK but in most of the western world: we regard killing an animal for its meat as a lesser offence (or no offence at all) than killing it for sport.
Full disclosure: I do, too. I love eating meat, yet when I meet a tourist travelling for the purposes of a game hunt, they fall in my estimation.
But it’s not obvious that my rationale for enjoying a beef steak is more justifiable than a person getting a primal satisfaction from hitting a lion square between the eyes. I don’t need to eat steak: someone does need to shoot a lion or a deer from time to time. It’s not just that we blanch at letting big game hunters display trophies; saying you are happy to eat a deer cleanly killed by a hunter who took satisfaction in doing so is considered stranger than munching on a hamburger from an animal slaughtered by an unhappy worker in an industrial abattoir.
It’s not just in the killing of animals where the question of satisfaction in work is complex. We may feel uneasy at a soldier who is particularly enthused to be serving in active conflict, or a teacher who enjoys giving detention, even while accepting these are necessary jobs. But equally we draw comfort if the person who cleans our office is a neat freak, and are perturbed if the staff at our children’s nursery don’t care for babies. So why do we prefer it that poorer countries pay someone to manage their animal populations rather than charge a tourist to do it?
Our intuition is, I think, half-right: there is something a little sinister in enjoying the act of taking a life, however necessary. But with British MPs hasty in moving against an act they find distasteful in a way that mounts the cost on countries far from ourselves, we ought to start by thinking a little more about our own dining habits at least.