Because the hedgehog numbers are in steep decline. But, if Britain sees itself as a hedgehog, we are in big trouble. Indeed, as a great emblem for the nation, second only to Her Majesty. A few years ago, the British people voted it as our most popular wild mammal. Whether she was a Leninist, Trotskyite or Stalinist, would require more profound textual analysis.īut maybe, Isaiah Berlin has done the wee beastie a great disservice. Doubtless, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle would have been a Marxist if she could have just thrown off the false consciousness imposed upon her by Beatrix Potter. Evidently then, the hedgehog, and people of the hedgehog outlook, are a threat to freedom. According to Isaiah Berlin “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In other words, the hedgehog knows only one big explanatory idea, such as the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism whilst the fox skips merrily from one idea to another in a jolly western world of free thought. In his book The Hedgehog and the Fox, published at the height of the Cold War in 1953, he explained how the spiny creature was at the heart of the Red Scare. Isaiah Berlin was one of the great minds of the twentieth century and, from his lofty position as a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he posited the theory that hedge-hog ideology was essentially totalitarian. Mr Tiggy-Winkle is, of course, nowhere to be seen during all this unpaid work.īut the hedgehog also has a profound philosophical significance. Not only does Mrs Tiggy-Winkle have to wash all the clothes of the wider voletariat, she is then forced to run a delivery service with only the help of a gormless privileged girl called Lucie. The beautiful cycle of rebirth in the form of a small prickly mammal, perhaps.įeminists have tended to seize upon the tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle: an oppressed washerwoman whose cute little cottage is, in fact, a laundry cum sweat shop. Some neo-Druids see their unfolding, from the ball position, as a symbol of the rise of the sun. They are, after all, closer to Mother Earth than most of us. For some, the hedgehog has great spiritual symbolism. The hedgehog may be small but it has some weighty significance.

The hedgehog is surely one of our great national treasures and maybe we should all climb into hedgerows on the second day of February and give them a clap. (This should not be confused with the American Groundhog Day, which is a day when the news is about the same thing every day, but that doesn’t happen in this country.) Let’s all celebrate because February 2 is National Hedgehog Day in the UK.

It is surely time to come to the defence of the scruffy eccentric creature who blunders about in a garden but can’t really give you a plausible explanation about what they are doing.

Mrs tiggy winkle