A THORNY legal question must be answered before an employment tribunal decides whether or not a claim for unfair dismissal by gardener and hunt saboteur Joe Hashman against Orchard Park Garden Centre in Gillingham can go ahead.

Judge Lawrence Guyer will make his decision after hearing a day of arguments at the Southampton tribunal offices this week.

Mr Hashman – Dirty Nails in this magazine – claims that his part-time employment working on an organic vegetable plot at the garden centre was terminated because of his anti-hunting views, and that those views are philosophical beliefs that can be protected by anti-discrimination legislation.

On Monday Judge Guyer heard Mr Hashman's lengthy, and often emotional, statement of the history of his beliefs, starting when, as a 14-year-old boy, he picked up an anti-vivisection leaflet at a market in Oxford.

From that time, Mr Hashman told the hearing, he had been vegetarian. He also joined various pressure groups, taking part in civil disobedience and direct (but always non violent) action against fur farms, vivisection laboratories, hunts, poultry factories and other organisations he opposed.

Now, at the age of 42, he had opposed all forms of cruelty to animals for 28 years in various ways, refining his opinion of the efficacy of different types of action taken by protest groups but never deviating from his beliefs, on which his life choices were based, he said.

Mr Hashman's solicitors Bindmans instructed Ivan Hare, a barrister who appeared for the "green martyr" Tim Nicholson, whose 2009 case against his former employers, Grainger plc, (Britain's biggest residential property investment company) was cited as precedent.

That case found that Mr Nicholson's beliefs in climate change "amounted to a philosophical belief under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, 2003" – the legislation under which Mr Hashman's claim is brought.

Counsel for Orchard Park (named in the action as Milton Park [Dorset] Ltd), was Bristol based Nick Smith, instructed by Gillingham solicitors MacLachlan.

Reading his statement detailing his long involvement with animal rights and preventing cruelty to animals, Mr Hashman stressed that his beliefs had always been in the sanctity of all life, human and animal. For that reason his stance was non violent, but he had spoken for, and would continue to speak for, those who had no voice.

He told the hearing that at one time he had been the most recognisable hunt saboteur in the region, but he had given up "work in the field" (which had included undercover operations for animal rights groups) for a number of reasons. In 2001 he married and took on a family, he was diagnosed with a degenerative illness and, he told the judge, he had been told of a "plot" to "take him out" by breaking his legs.

He no longer believed that all the tactics of the various groups with which he has been involved were necessarily the most effective actions, but he continued to support the aims and philosophy of the groups.

"I am a mature, grown-up, intelligent man, who has chosen to live in the real world," he said, later refuting an allegation that he was involved in "class warfare" by saying that hunting attracted all classes of society and he considered himself to be "middle class".

He had brought the present action not to get money from his former employers, but to try to ensure that his being dismissed from employments he loved would not be repeated on the grounds of his animal rights beliefs. It had happened three times, he told the hearing.

Conservation group

Early in his working life he was dismissed from a conservation group near his Oxford home, when his anti-hunting stance conflicted with the practices of one of his superiors.

He was dismissed from Shaftesbury Town Council – " A job I loved, loved" – when he came into conflict with a man called in to exterminate pigeons on the Town Hall.

And he claims that the Orchard Park job, which he described as "inspiring people to grow their own food, gently" came to an end following the publicity surrounding a court case involving Clarissa Dickson-Wright at a hare coursing meet.

Taking the job at Orchard Park, he had thought he was working for Richard Cummings, a man he had known for a long time, liked and respected. He did not know that the business was partly owned by Sheila and Ron Clark, who were the major shareholders.

He had also been surprised to see Andrew Prater, whom he described as "a psychopath .. the man I feared more than anyone else I had met in the hunting field," working just over the fence from his vegetable plot. He later learned that Mr Prater was the Clarks' farm manager.

Asked by Mr Smith why, having discovered that "his sworn enemy" Mr Prater was working in close proximity, he had not immediately left the job, Mr Hashman said that he felt he could do more to influence people to grow their own produce, organically, by continuing to inspire them with the Orchard Park beds.

He was also asked about selling his books, based on the Blackmore Vale Magazine's Dirty Nails column, in a shop near to a meat section where cattle from the adjoining farm were butchered. He said that living in North Dorset meant seeing farm animals every day. As he chose to live in the real world, rather than as a hermit, he was inevitably exposed to aspects of animal use of which he did not approve.

Asked about fox hunting, Mr Hashman said: "There is a guerrilla war being fought in the countryside over the life of a fox, and I am part of it.

"My beliefs affect every aspect of my life on a daily basis, and when choices have to be made regarding how to behave as a human consumer. Aside from the food I eat and the clothes I wear, my philosophical beliefs affect the work I am prepared to do, or not do, the places I am prepared to visit and how I spend my time and resources," he said.

Asked by Mr Smith about his writing for the Blackmore Vale Magazine, which frequently carried articles about field sports and employed what he described as "the editor, or the field sports editor" who had published a book on hunting with air rifles, Mr Hashman said that the magazine was "a broad church" which some weeks might be seen to be pro-hunting and on other weeks would carry a predominance of anti hunting stories.

He wanted to continue writing as Dirty Nails to enable him to reach a new audience and empower them to grow their own foods – "a great way to reconnect those people with the bigger holistic picture of life and their place within it. I allow myself to muse on wider environmental and ethical issues and state my opinion," he said.

He denied that an article talking about squashing caterpillar larvae on lettuce plants in his fingers was against his intrinsic beliefs.

Neither Sheila Clark nor Richard Cummings, who were present at the hearing, gave any evidence.

The question of why and on what grounds Mr Hashman's employment at Orchard Park ended will be decided at a later full hearing, if the judge has been convinced that a belief in animal rights can be a philosophical belief, and, if so, it was held by Mr Hashman at the relevant time. That's jurisprudence.

Gay Pirrie-Weir