Landmark. You know. Like a church.

On Wednesday it was reported that Joe Hashman, a garden centre employee fired from his job in a garden centre for his <a href=”javascript:alert(“I know it’s normal to say ‘anti-fox hunting’ but I think that looks like he hunts anti-foxes. Which would, I suppose, cancel out fox hunts, thus furthering his aims.”);”>anti-fox-hunting</a> views and activities, sued his erstwhile employers and won a preliminary hearing. The newspapers described this as

• "a landmark ruling" (the Guardian)
• "a landmark ruling" (the Telegraph)
• "a landmark ruling" (This Is North Devon)
• "a landmark ruling" (the Daily Mail), and
• "a landmark legal battle" (Bournemouth Echo)

I think perhaps @guardianstyle would be interested in this phenomenon. But more to the point, I’m not convinced it is a landmark legal ruling. As far as I can see, it’s identical to the case of Tim Nicholson, about a year and a half ago, who was sacked for insisting on being green at work. Indeed, the Guardian and Telegraph articles draw the same comparison. Whether the ubiquitous word “landmark” is a cliché or churnalism I don’t know.

The papers go on to say

• "Court rules anti-hunt views should be protected by laws on religious equality in the workplace" (the Daily Mail)
• "Views on foxhunting have been placed on the same legal footing as religion" (the Telegraph), and
• "Anti-fox hunting views have been given the same legal footing as religion" (This Is North Devon)

Again, I don’t know how much of this phrasing has been copy-pasted, and again, it isn’t really true – at least, not without the caveat that “anti-fox hunting views” means “this one guy’s anti-fox hunting views”. The law protects any “deeply held” belief – and depth of conviction is measured by deeds, not profession. So just reckoning that fox hunting or climate change is a bad thing wouldn’t be protected, but having devoted large chunks of your life to activism (as Hashman and Nicholson did) shows that it’s a serious part of who your are, and as such it would be discrimination to fire you simply for that. The preliminary hearing simply says that. The main hearing will decide if these views were actually discriminated against.

And it wasn’t even “anti-hunt views” in this case – it was views about the sanctity of life, which included specific opinions on fox hunting and hare coursing.

The Telegraph also posted some background on the discrimination laws used in this case, but even reading both, it’s hard to see how anyone could reach any conclusion other than the false one that your opinion on fox hunting is now treated as a religion by discrimination law. And that simply isn’t what happened.