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Mrs. Gorman: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Forth: I will, but I want to conclude my remarks.
Mrs. Gorman: I wish to intervene only briefly. My right hon. Friend has long and detailed knowledge of Government policies, and will know that in the past a Labour Government, when they were nationalising our great industries in the 1960s, paid more than adequate compensation to businesses that they took over. Some of those businesses with moribund stocks received--
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. Has the hon. Lady finished?
Mrs. Gorman: I was about to finish, Mr. Deputy Speaker, before you told me to sit down.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Unfortunately, I could not hear what the hon. Lady was saying because she was not addressing the Chair. Perhaps she could do so now.
Mrs. Gorman: I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was complimenting my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) on his knowledge of the history of political activity and pointing out to him that in the past the Labour party has accepted the principle of a more than reasonable level of compensation. When a Labour Government were nationalising all our great national industries--shipbuilding, railways, the mines and
the car industry--they paid more than adequate compensation. Some industries with moribund plant received many millions of pounds. The Labour party has accepted the principle of compensation and it should be incorporated into the Bill.
Mr. Forth: I am grateful as ever to my hon. Friend. She has led me to my penultimate point, and that is the reference in clause 5(3)(a) to the role of the Lands Tribunal, which puzzles me. Surely the Lands Tribunal is distinctly unqualified to make judgments on appropriate levels of compensation in the area that we are discussing. It would be difficult enough to establish the appropriate level of compensation in the event that fur farms were closed down by law. To provide in the Bill that the Lands Tribunal is the appropriate body to make such judgments strikes me as being somewhat odd. The hon. Member for Garston no doubt had a perfectly good reason for the reference. When she replies, she might tell us why the reference was to the Lands Tribunal as opposed to any other body or institution that could deal with the matter. The reference strikes me as being somewhat odd.
I intended to refer--perhaps one of my hon. Friends will pick up the point--to welfare. If the argument is about the welfare of the animals rather than some other principle, surely the thrust of the argument should be about the enforcement of welfare conditions.
Mr. Forth:
I shall leave it to my right hon. Friend.
I round off my speech with the point that if we are talking about the welfare of animals--mainly or almost exclusively mink in this instance--we should look to existing regulations to see whether they are adequate, and then to enforcement. Simply to say that animals are suffering and therefore we should go straight to a prohibition or ban is not acceptable.
Mr. Desmond Swayne (New Forest, West):
I shall not detain the House for long, as most of the arguments that I would have made have been made--some by Opposition Members, surprisingly, and some by Labour Members--and I have disposed of some of my points in interventions.
Tendentious nonsense is associated with both sides of the argument. The early-day motion that trailed the Bill referred to inessential commodities and luxury and expensive items. Traces of that argument have been rehearsed today. I regard that as entirely irrelevant. It
would appalling if we banned items because they were expensive or luxurious or inessential. I do not wish to go down that road.
Mr. Maclean:
In case I am not able to speak in the debate, may I ask my hon. Friend whether he is aware that 90 per cent. of the output of British mink farms is not used for the fashion trade and worthless accessories, as some have put it, but is exported to bitterly cold countries where it is made into absolutely essential life-saving articles of clothing?
Mr. Swayne:
The question of where the output goes is a matter of supreme indifference to me. I am indifferent whether it goes for a luxury item or an essential item. Given the limited output of a limited number of farms, I do not see my right hon. Friend's point as being particularly salient.
We have heard the libertarian argument--the vital principle that we should not legislate to ban activities simply because we disapprove of them. There should be a self-denying ordinance on politicians in any free society. The test of true liberalism is whether we are prepared to tolerate aspects of behaviour with which we are profoundly unhappy. That is an important principle, but it is not inviolable. It must have a test applied to it. The test must be the public good that will be achieved or the public evil that will be avoided by breaching that principle.
I come down in favour of the principle of the Bill. I do not appreciate that there is any difference in principle between farming for food and farming for leather or fur. I would not follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) in the arguments that he advanced, which appeared to be a form of militant vegetarianism. I have not dined with my right hon. Friend, but my reading tells me that he has a sophisticated palate. Given the arguments that he put before the House today, it would seem that in future he would be lucky if he were able to dine on birdseed.
The issue of cruelty as far as it attends fur farming is underlined by the fact that we have been told by those who oppose the Bill that fur has been farmed in the same way for 80 generations. It strikes me that if we were unable, in 80 generations of farming, to come up with a more humane method of doing so, that is a logical argument for moving straight to a ban, rather than filtering that process through some form of regulation.
Given the nature of mink as wild animals, there is no humane way of farming them that would not present an unacceptable level of danger to the natural wildlife and fauna of this country, which is after all a small island. Exactly the same argument applies to genetically modified crops.
The science that has been adduced with respect to the mink gene pool strikes me as fundamentally flawed. It seems to owe a great deal more to the discredited ideas of Dr. Lamarck and the case of the midwife toad in the last century than to any kind of logical examination of the facts as they present themselves.
It is monstrous for hon. Members to suggest that mink are a domestic animal. We have, over generations, bred a number of domesticated species, so much so that chickens are now egg-laying machines and could not possibly survive in the wild. Nor, indeed, could cows, which are
bred as milking machines--they could not survive in the wild because there would be no one to milk them. That is not the case with mink.
Mr. Peter Atkinson:
I am fascinated by my hon. Friend's turn of argument. Is he saying that we should not raise pigs in confined circumstances and all should graze the New Forest?
Mr. Swayne:
The pigs that graze the New Forest for those commoners with such a right provide a great service and the other stock in the forest provide a vital ecological function. The mink do not do so. They destroy our indigenous animal populations, which have never been exposed to such a threat. I urge my hon. Friend to attend the owl sanctuary at Crow Hill and speak to the curator about the damage and destruction done as a consequence of the escape of mink. Such escapes are an inevitable consequence of mink farming and do not always arise from direct action by lunatic animal rights organisations.
Mr. Atkinson:
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way a second time. I agree entirely that feral mink are a tremendous problem, which is why I enjoy hunting them with a pack of hounds. Will he join me in saying that Labour Members should stop attacking the hunting of mink with hounds and support it?
Mr. Swayne:
I entirely concur with my hon. Friend. It was regrettable that New Forest district council did not call upon the mink hounds to assist with the remedying of the situation when it dealt with the escape in July last year.
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