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11.42 am
Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster): It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn), who is a former parliamentarian of the year. His remarks about drag hunting did not demonstrate a total understanding of the subject. No doubt we can return to that in Committee, for which I volunteer.
I also congratulate the hon. Member for Wansdyke (Dan Norris) on his maiden speech. I have walked a large part of the dyke, great stretches of which are devoted to sites of special scientific interest and nature reserves. He chose an appropriate subject for his maiden speech.
I declare an interest, having gone beagling while in Northern Ireland. I stopped when The Irish Times put the fact on its front page. The beagles and I were then under greater threat from unusually dangerous saboteurs.
I spoke in the debate on 3 March 1995. Those words are on the record and I shall seek to avoid repeating them, save to say that I patently speak as an urban Member and one of only two remaining examples of a temporarily endangered species--a Conservative Member in an inner-city seat. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) has already spoken, we have certainly pulled our weight in the debate.
I am particularly conscious that the consequences of the Bill will impinge not on my constituents or those of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea, but on the rural community. Social scientists much to the left of me complained after the war of the effects of slum clearance on old people, which turned extended families into dispersed ones. I remark neutrally that that cause was pursued in the name of Greater London strategic planning. The effects on communities of our actions on fox hunting are smaller in scale, but potentially as seismic.
I have been a Londoner all my life, apart from evacuation, parts of my education, time in the Army and time spent abroad. My constituents who wish to see me continually during the week are as happy to see the back of me at the weekend as they are to see the back of the 700,000 daily commuters to the constituency. As an antidote to the metropolitan monopoly of discourse in this constituency, my wife and I have a shepherd's cottage in Wiltshire, where we are surrounded by sheep, pheasants, hares, deer, voles and foxes.
I understand the fox's place in the scheme of things. I derive pleasure from watching the fox in its habitat, and my admiration for its qualities of resource and adaptability are akin to Shakespeare's, who, in 33 references to the fox, is admiring of it in 31. I hope that my few immediate human neighbours do not regard me as that unlyrical creature, a townie, although I acknowledge that I am not a countryman in all senses of the word. Constituents have told me that townies are changing the countryside and imply that the Countryside Alliance is trading under a false banner.
I do not believe that. The "Reader's Digest Atlas" has a page devoted to hair colour, which demonstrates, 1,000 years after the event, a precise correlation with how far the Vikings got. In 1982, the Wiltshire Record Society published the judicial notebook of 500 cases tried by the resident magistrate in my former village from 1744 to 1749. The index of plaintiffs and prisoners shows a precise correlation with today's electoral register.
I quoted the written word in 1995. Hunting has produced the greatest body of sporting literature in our language after cricket. I might have added that Sartorius, the Herrings, Stubbs, Ferneley, Sir Francis Grant, Munnings and Lionel Edwards have similarly enriched our artistic heritage. I mention them again today, from Scott to Sassoon, because analogies are made with bear baiting, badger baiting and cock fighting. I cannot conceive the incomparable writing on hunting--from authors such as Fielding, Surtees, Trollope, Somerville and Ross, Conan Doyle, Kipling, Saki and Masefield--being devoted to any of those activities, and I cannot imagine any of those authors resisting their departure.
One agreeable by-product of the long forewarning of this debate is that I have had the chance to acquire economically at auction the great classic of 1784,
Peter Beckford's, "Thoughts about Hunting in a Series of Familiar Letters to a Friend", which writers on the fox say has not been superseded in two centuries.
Of more recent writings, the League Against Cruel Sports published some years back, but undated--I can find no entry later than 1990--a series of excerpts by acknowledged experts. It was a trifle unscholarly, not giving the pagination from the various publications, but with the great assistance of the House of Commons Library, I have tracked most of them down, not least to read them in context. I shall return to them in a moment.
The great rally in July assembled in my constituency. It was a model of decorum, showing the British at their best. Most of my constituents who have written to me have been courteous, although that spirit of hysteria evident among the supporters of the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster) in the Carlton Television debate the other night has crept into some correspondence. That attitude may have been responsible for the television poll having a different outcome from national polls.
Some of the lobbying organisations seem to have an Ecclestonian confidence that spending a million quid on the Labour party is a good each-way bet. I find the enthusiasm of the lobbying organisations for stimulating my constituents to write to me is matched by a reluctance of those organisations to reply to me when I send them sentences that treat on tendentious statements and end in a question mark. It is possible that they are paying me the compliment of treating all my questions as rhetorical, but total silence in riposte from people who claim to be in charge of what they call parliamentary affairs is not ipso facto persuasive. One is left to conjecture whether they do not know the answers or whether they know them, but do not like them.
It is striking that the scientific evidence, by which I have been greatly impressed, has been transformed since the 1960s by radio tracking and infra-red binoculars. Debate in the 1960s about whether dog foxes bring food for vixens and their cubs was sparse because of shortage of evidence. That situation has been transformed in the past 30 years.
Like many hon. Members, I immensely enjoyed, both for its scholarship and its narrative, David MacDonald's "Running with the Fox", published in 1987. I am vicariously proud that he should have been a fellow of my old Oxford college. Some of the most moving and impressive features of the book are the passages where he describes, in the process of his researches, working with farmers, both in Cumnor--the village from which my father took his title in another place--and at Ravenglass in Cumbria, where fox research had already been done. It is a tribute to Mr. Macdonald that his relations with farmers were so good, but it comes forcefully and vividly through his narrative that the farming community was overall implacably opposed to the fox as a pest.
Unless the fox becomes a protected species, which seems unlikely after the cormorant experience since 1981, the perception of farmers if hunting goes will be a critical factor to the survival of foxes in the relevant areas. There is a hazard in this House in being intellectually honest, in that one's concessions can be pocketed while the central point is ignored, but I concede that Vesey FitzGerald in the 1960s took the view that foxes in hunting areas would survive the end of hunting.
In this year of grace, David Bellamy has implied the opposite view. I have seen comparatively little scientific comment or prediction on this hypothetical aspect. It is ironic to allude to the uncertainty of this scenario as a shot in the dark in the era of lamping, but it is one of the sad concomitants of lamping that the marksman cannot tell whether he has a pregnant vixen in his sights.
Other aspects of hunting require further research, as was acknowledged by the Phelps report, but those of us who do not hunt but take a serious interest in conservation can reasonably require that there should be evidence that farmers have accepted the conclusions of the hon. Member for Worcester about the agricultural evidence elements. I remark in passing that, when he quoted the Ministry of Agriculture as saying that
Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire):
I have been waiting all morning for a convincing argument against the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster), and, at last, the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke) has given us one. Apparently, it will bring about the end of English literature.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester on his fortitude in introducing the Bill. It cannot be easy to undergo for months the abuse that has been heaped on him by blood sporters, and keep coming up smiling as he has done.
I wish to refer to a different sort of literature--an article in The Observer last week by John Mortimer, who accused my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester of following the example of Nazi Germany. I am sorry to have to quote this, but he calls my hon. Friend
Mr. Mortimer, or Lord whatever he is, goes on to say:
"the Ministry does not consider foxes to be a significant factor in lamb mortality",
he notably omitted the next words:
"but it should be stressed that this is against a background of widespread fox control by farmers."
The alternative is that scientists deliver a convincing forecast of what will happen to foxes if hunting goes. Neither the hon. Member for Worcester nor his allies have convinced me. If hon. Members who support the Bill think that it is a paradox that more foxes will die if hunting goes, they betray the fact that they do not understand the countryside.
11.52 am
"nasty snide little Foster . . . you little turd".
He was quoting the comedian Harry Enfield. In the circles where stand-up comedians and Members of the House of Lords move, that probably counts as Augustan satire.
"Mr. Foster wishes to cram our overflowing prisons not only with middle-aged horsewomen and pony-club girls from the shires, but with unemployed miners".
He says that hunting with dogs is akin to
"Morris dancing, karaoke and synchronised swimming."
That is an example of the informed argument that the blood sporters say they want. The quotation contains the fascinating assumption that blood sporters are the sort of people who will not obey the law--an assumption that we do not share.
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