| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. This so-called debate is supposed to finish at 10.40. Are we going to have a debate or just listen to this intellectually threadbare diatribe from the Minister?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: The hon. Gentleman has been here long enough to know that that is not a point of order for the Chair. It is for the Minister to decide whether he takes interventions, and it is for hon. Members to decide whether they seek to make them.
Alun Michael: I shall take that as an encouragement not to take further interventions.
I shall deal with one further point briefly before giving other hon. Members their chance to comment. There has been some attempt to suggest that the status of the Bill has changed in the past 10 days. I wish to make it clear that this remains the Government's Bill. More formally, it remains a public general Bill, sponsored by the Government. The amendments have not changed its status. It has been suggested that it had been turned into a private Member's Bill or even a hybrid Bill. All such suggestions are mischievous and I refute them.
Once the Bill has been given a Third Reading by the Commons, it will go through the normal legislative stages in the House of Lords, where it may be amended. We hope that the other place will engage with the Bill when it passes there. If the Commons agrees with the Lords amendments, or the two Houses agree on alternative amendments, the Bill will become law in the normal way. The amendments made by the Commons have not altered the formalities or the decisions that might have to be taken at a later stage by the authorities of the House. The Bill should be treated as a Government Bill, which is what it is.
I am sure that hon. Members will appreciate that it is difficult to deal with issues that are so polarised between those who are passionately in favour of legislation and those who are against it. It has been my responsibility to try to bring the Bill before the House in good order and to seek to persuade Members of Parliament to support it.
Then, having heard the decision of this House last week, it was my responsibility to make sure that the Bill was put into good order, consistent with the House's decisions.
The extremism with which Opposition Members approached this debate and their unwillingness to listen to any voice other than their own do no great credit to them or to the Conservative party. I hope that the Bill will be given a Third Reading so that it can be moved forward and that it will receive a more responsible and reasonable response in another place.
10.10 pm
Mr. Gray: In the Minister's introductory remarks a moment or two ago, he said that the process that had brought us to this point in our proceedings had been "interesting". However, I should describe it as the most dreary, despicable, unfair, illiberal and undemocratic parliamentary process for a very long time.
The Government have been humiliated by their own Back Benchers. The Minister's personal standing lies in tatters. In his own words, ignorance and prejudice have been allowed, in his reformed Bill, to override common sense and scientific evidence. A potentially acceptable process for regulating hunting has been ignored. Our proceedings have been allowed to degenerate into a lynch mob, and the result is an outright ban. Parliament's primary duty must be to safeguard the rights and interests of minorities, but it has been turned into a vehicle for the class warrior vegetarians on the Government Benches to enforce their worst prejudices on a decent, law-abiding minority.
If it is passed, the Bill will criminalise hundreds of thousands of decent, law-abiding citizens who, up to now, would have gone out of their way to avoid as much
as a parking ticket. The disgracefully guillotined and muddled parliamentary process was typified by the fact that, earlier, we were not even able to consider the second and third groups of amendments selected for debate.When the Minister wrote to us to announce the Portcullis House hearings, he said that he was determined to fulfil the Labour party manifesto commitment to settle the matter of hunting once and for all. I remember him saying that he would do it in a fair, balanced and scientific way that would stand the test of time. We who support the liberties and livelihoods of the countryside broadly welcomed that approach.
Everyone at the Portcullis House hearings accepted that no one had proved that hunting was necessarily cruel. Burns did not do that, and Professor Sir Patrick Bateson certainly did not do that. He was the man who so memorably labelled the Minister as "scientifically illiterate" for claiming that he had "irrefutable evidence" about the outright cruelty of deer hunting. None of the scientists—including the 500 distinguished members of the Vets for Hunting organisation—said that it was cruel. All agreed that the evidence was, as yet, inconclusive, and that further work in a variety of areas was necessary.
We welcomed, broadly speaking, the Minister's balanced and scientific approach. We were ready to work with him to determine whether there were practices that needed to be approved. We were ready to consider the implications of some kind of modest and balanced licensing regime, if that were to be considered necessary.
We were bitterly disappointed by the Bill, when it was eventually published. The Minister had ignored Burns, and the Portcullis House conclusions. He produced a Bill that he estimated, in his cynical way, would ban most hunting and would therefore be enough to buy off his Back-Bench colleagues. How wrong can one be?
By that very act, the Minister ruined the entire logic and architecture of his whole approach. Illogically and bizarrely, he banned deer hunting and hare hunting outright. Even then, we took the view that the Bill was capable of amendment into a reasonable and liberal licensing regime. We tried to achieve exactly that in Committee, but the Minister was hijacked by his own Back Benchers into further illiberalising the cruelty and utility tests, and into further outright bans on hare hunting and on terrier work.
It is interesting to look at the Minister's record on the subject of terrier work. When he introduced the Bill, he advocated that it should be subject to registration. In Standing Committee, he voted for it to be banned. Last week, when the Bill was recommitted to Standing Committee, he introduced an exemption for some aspects of terrier work.
Where is the principle and evidence to support that twisting and turning? Why will that stand the test of time, as the Minister put it? It will not: there is no principle of any kind in that, nor in the rest of his disgraceful little Bill. The Minister has been hijacked by his own Back Benchers and the bizarre parliamentary proceedings last week "wrecked"—his word—the entire logic and architecture of the Bill.
Lembit Öpik: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the scientific evidence is clear and that the consequence of
the Bill will be increased suffering for animals in the countryside, because shooting creates more wounding? So the RSPCA, the League against Cruel Sports, the hon. Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks) and the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) can take satisfaction in knowing that they have created exactly the opposite of what they purported to be fighting for in the first place.
Mr. Gray: The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. Nobody, but nobody, has suggested that fewer foxes will be killed as a result of the Bill. Almost certainly, far more foxes will be killed. The debate has been about the means by which they will be killed. The answer is that they will be snared, shot and even poisoned in some circumstances—the Minister will do that in towns for protection against rabies. Foxes will die far more cruelly—they will die in ditches from gangrene—than they have in recent times from being hunted.
Gregory Barker: They do not care.
Mr. Gray: As my hon. Friend says, Labour Members do not care; all they care about is their class warfare prejudice. They could not care less about the animal welfare aspects of the measure.
Mr. Swire: Does my hon. Friend agree that if any element of this tawdry Bill were concerned with animal welfare, there is no way that deer hunting would be banned until something had been put in place to deal with the culling of deer on Exmoor, as witness the latest reports from Baronsdown?
Mr. Gray: My hon. Friend makes an extremely strong point on deer hunting. There is no "inexorable logic", as the Minister described it, that would justify the outright ban on stag hunting. It would have been perfectly logical to include all kinds of mammal—deer and hare—as well as foxes and mink, and to allow the registrar and the tribunal to consider the matter. We would have accepted that general approach, but the moment that the Minister banned deer hunting and hare coursing outright and allowed, with no further consideration, rabbiting and ratting, he wrecked any scientific logic that lay behind the Bill in a desperate attempt, which then failed, to buy off his own rabid Back Benchers.
Mr. Bellingham: May I remind my hon. Friend of submissions sent to me by the Swaffham hare coursing club? In that part of Norfolk, there is a healthy hare population; they are protected by keepers and preserved by farmers and smallholders. If hare coursing was banned, farmers would shoot the hares, as they are worth about £5 each and are quite valuable, and we would have a proliferation of illegal hare coursing, which keepers and farmers currently prevent and police. In a sparsely populated rural area, it would be impossible to police illegal hare coursing.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |