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11.26 am
Mr. Alan Clark (Kensington and Chelsea): I am glad to follow the hon. Member for Wansdyke (Dan Norris), and I congratulate him on a lucid and informative speech. I also commiserate with him on the ordeal of having to make his maiden speech before a very crowded Chamber. It is bad enough to make a maiden speech when there are, as there usually are, three hon. Members in the Chamber, but to do it on an occasion such as this, before such a crowd, is a most commendable act of courage.
Throughout my political life, I have been committed to the cause of animal welfare. One of the first acts that I did on entering the Chamber, as the hon. Member for Hull, North (Mr. McNamara) will know, was to support
in a maiden speech his Hare Coursing (Abolition) Bill. Currently, I am a sponsor of the Welfare of Pigs Bill, which is promoted by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin). I believe that we are debating an issue that has to cross party divides.
During my period away from the House--from my own choice, I hasten to say--I was on a picket line at Dover docks. I also went to the funeral of Jill Phipps, an animal rights demonstrator, at Coventry cathedral. I hope that the House will realise that such activities are not likely to enhance one's standing with Conservative selection committees, although I was not then representing a constituency.
I must say--having, I hope, established my credentials on the issue--that this is a bad Bill. It is badly drafted. Nowhere in the text, for example, can be found the word "fox". Most of the text is devoted to penalties and to increased police powers. I do not understand how Labour Members--if they have read the Bill; perhaps they have not--can support a Bill that allows constables to make arrests without warrant and to stop and search. I thought that stopping and searching was one of the practices that Labour Members found most objectionable.
The Bill would also allow forfeiture of vehicles. Moreover, it confers draconian powers and discretion on the police. It is not an exaggeration to say that, on the Bill's literal terms, a family who go to a park with their children and a dog and are reported as possibly being about to use that dog to chase a wild mammal, such as a squirrel, may not only have their dog impounded--or, to use the euphemism frequently deployed in the text, "disposed of"--
Mr. Peter Bradley (The Wrekin):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Clark:
If the hon. Gentleman will excuse me, he might be able to intervene a little later. The 10-minutes rule applies. I must develop this theme because it is an important aspect of civil liberties.
The family could lose the dog and the car and be subject to draconian fines purely on the suspicion, not even of a police officer, but of a member of the public who reports the family to a police officer.
As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) said, the penalties suggested in the Bill are grossly excessive. They are completely out of line with the Bill's aims. The powers that it confers on the police are grotesque, although I recognise that the issue arouses strong emotions.
The hon. Member for Worcester cited some extremely harrowing examples of what children have seen. My response to him is, how about a guided tour of abattoirs for schoolchildren? What about a guided tour of experimental laboratories where animals are confined and tortured for the furtherance of corporate profit? What worries me about the Bill is that it damages the cause of animal welfare. By taking one particular aspect in isolation, it focuses all the attention away from the real atrocities which are perpetrated daily, not for amusement--I fully accept that it is disreputable to torture animals for amusement--but in the pursuit of profit and so-called knowledge. The repetitious and brutal experiments and the conditions in stockyards across the country are such that the hon. Member for Worcester
would never take a party of schoolchildren from his constituency there to see what really happens. The real danger of the Bill is that it distracts attention from all that and focuses--[Interruption.] What have hon. Members done, as I have done, to further the cause of animal rights?
Mr. Paul Flynn (Newport, West):
Will the right hon. Gentleman explain why, when he was a Minister in the Ministry of Defence, the number of experiments in defence laboratories increased from about 5,000 in 1992 to 11,000 last year?
Mr. Clark:
The hon. Gentleman's statistics cover precisely the period when I was not at the Ministry of Defence. I left in 1992, and it is clearly a tribute to my personal restraint while in office that, from the moment I left, the number of experiments increased. I am ready to defend my ministerial career, but this is not the right time.
This is an issue on which there has to be some compromise. The Minister has to tell us what the Government are going to do. The absence from the Government Front Bench of so many dignitaries, the equivocal role of the Minister without Portfolio and many other facts have to be explained, but if some kind of restraint is to become law--not in this Bill but in some other form--there has to be a compromise. I have to tell my right hon. and hon. Friends, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King), that they will have to cede some points. They have to fact the fact that stag hunting is utterly repellent and enormously offensive to many people.
The practice of digging out, stopping up and cubbing has to go, and the same is true of hare coursing. I voted in favour of the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Hull, North to deal with hare coursing, but if there is to be a meeting of minds, I suggest that the hon. Member for Worcester and others who feel passionately about hunting with hounds have to move at least some way towards the centre so that something can be retained.
I do not want to get into the technicalities, as we do not have the time, but if the earths are not stopped up and if it is against the law to dig out the fox, the fox will nearly always win, and the element of sport returns. What is utterly despicable is that at the moment everything is weighted against the fox. That is what people find so offensive.
The Labour party has an enormous majority and can do anything it wants. If it chooses to do so, it can deploy the arrogance of power. One of my constituents wrote to the hon. Member for Worcester and was replied to in a manner that we are all often tempted to use, especially to constituents other than our own. The reply, which comprised only one line, stated:
Mr. Paul Flynn (Newport, West):
We all have regard for the long record of compassion towards the animal kingdom shown by the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark). However, he boasted in his diaries of, among other things, his ignorance of parliamentary procedure. He was clearly correct about parliamentary procedure because he should know that if there are problems with the Bill of the sort that he describes, they will be dealt with in Committee. That is the proper way to proceed.
I was surprised that the right hon. Gentleman followed what Labour Members have said by attempting to demonise certain species. Does he really believe that animals live according to the ten commandments, and that some, like the mink or the fox, are wicked, have unpleasant instincts and thus deserve to be treated barbarically? Animals live according to instinct--they aim to survive and to reproduce; we are the superior species.
The nub of the debate was brought out during the debate on the McNamara Bill. I was intervened on when I said that all hunters have to lose is their cruelty. They can keep the pageantry, the jobs and the--
Mr. Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale):
What would the hon. Gentleman say to Mr. Nicholson, a constituent of mine, who has written to me to say that he will lose his job and that his three-year old son and baby will lose their home if the Bill is passed? That is not theory but practice.
Mr. Flynn:
I would tell Mr. Nicholson that he will not lose his job, because the number of jobs will increase if hunters turn to drag hunting. It is nonsense for Conservative Members to talk about 35,000 jobs being lost when the activity employs fewer than 1,000 people.
If hunters turn to drag hunting, they can keep the pageantry, the horse riding and the dressing up in strange clothes. Everything can stay the same except that at the end of it there is no live quarry.
Mr. Flynn:
I am not giving way again.
Instead of having a live quarry, drag hunters have a trail laid by an intelligent human being. All they have to lose is their cruelty. The hon. Member for Romsey (Mr. Colvin), who was the hon. Member who intervened on me in the previous debate, said that there was a difference between hunting a live quarry and drag hunting. He said that having no live quarry was like kissing one's sister--there was no thrill. People who hunt want the thrill and the pleasure of seeing a live animal torn to shreds.
Some incidents in my constituency are the subject of a court case. A man from the hunt captured a fox from another part of the county, kept it in a milk churn for three days and then released it in front of the hunt. People were routinely capturing foxes, putting them in bags and releasing them in front of the hunt in order to ensure the long chase across the countryside before the animal was torn to pieces. That is the reality; it has nothing to do with pest control.
Foxes will reach their natural numbers, as they do in areas of the country where there is no hunting at all--in parts of Wales, for example--according to the amount of food available. They are also of use in forestry.
Perhaps the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea was right about the increase in animal experiments in our military laboratories since he left the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps it was all due to the other members of the previous Government. Some of those experiments are essential, but any sensible, right-thinking human being will be revolted by experiments that involve pigs, sheep and monkeys being crushed, irradiated or strapped to trolleys and shot. The number of experiments has increased threefold in the past five years.
The debate is about how we treat other species and our relationship with them. The compassion and consideration that we show those species is a mark of our civilisation. We cannot treat them as quarries for our entertainment or pleasure. They are creatures like us, with nervous systems. They feel pain, suffering and fear, just as we do. We cannot treat them as targets or a collection of inert, non-suffering chemicals. That demeans us as human beings.
"Your letter . . . amused me greatly. It has been some time since I have read such nonsense."
We are all tempted to respond in that way, but it is hardly the way to reply to a reasoned argument.
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