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Gregory Barker: I am listening very carefully to the hon. Gentleman's extremely courageous speech. The most thoughtful of the speeches in the other place that I have heard—those expounding the defence of liberty and showing the greatest concern for minorities—were made not by Conservative peers but Labour ones, some of whom were appointed only recently. One of the best speeches was made by Lord Waheed Alli.

Mr. Banks: That is only because the hon. Gentleman agrees with what he said.

Mr. Sheerman: Noises off, as my hon. Friend would say.

We are in a very difficult position. I am a political realist, and I know that the steamroller of the Parliament Act will be invoked, but I warn my colleagues that doing so will not do the Labour party or the Labour Government a great deal of good in the long term. At the end of the day, the British public rumbled Thatcherism—I am being very political here—because of the divisive nature of that Government. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Hull, North (Mr. McNamara) that it was a ghastly, divisive period in our history, but I am surprised that a Labour Government should be taking us back into the same territory. We may be dealing with a different minority, but they still have rights. I do not want to be seen, and I do not want my party to be seen, as willing to ignore other people's minority rights. We do not want that coming back to haunt us—and it will. This will not be resolved by the invocation of the Parliament Act.

We have a long history as a party that stands up for minorities and goes to the front line to protect their rights, but here we have a different sort of minority that we happen not to agree with, so we are going to trample all over their rights.

Claire Ward (Watford) (Lab): It is a real shame that I have to disagree with my hon. Friend, but I can tell him that there is outright support for this policy in the Watford party and among my constituents. People want us to settle the issue, because we promised that we would. It is also a matter of trust: in the past two general
 
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election campaigns, we said that we would bring the matter to a close. It is absolutely clear that the majority in this House favour a ban on hunting. We can take into account all sorts of minority issues, but at the end of the day, if hunting is wrong, we must take a stand against it. I believe that it is fundamentally wrong and unacceptable in the 21st century in modern Britain and I shall be very pleased to vote to ban it tonight.

Mr. Sheerman: I understand my hon. Friend's view, and recognise the passion with which she holds it. I, too, hold passionate views, but I worry about her conclusion that we should now rush this through with the Parliament Act when we know that a substantial number of people in our country profoundly disagree with it.

Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab): It will not surprise the House to hear that I agree with everything that my hon. Friend has said. May I remind him and the House that in the two votes in the Commons and the Lords last year, 406 parliamentarians supported a licensing system, compared with 366 backing a ban? On Third Reading, let us not forget, only 317 of the 659 Members of Parliament voted for a ban. That is not an absolute majority.

Mr. Sheerman: My hon. Friend and I mostly agree on this, and I thank her for that intervention.

We have a stand-off between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. I have been in politics for a long time, and it seems to me that the best solution in such a situation is to seek compromise, to meet somewhere halfway, and I have to say that, time and again, there is—[Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. We must not have sedentary interventions. I also remind the hon. Gentleman that we are talking about the procedure motion.

Mr. Sheerman: Yes we are, and I am saying that I regret my party's support for the use of the Parliament Act, because as a Government, as a party and as professional politicians, surely it would be better, rather than taking the Thatcher way in a stand-off, for us to say to one another that we must find a compromise. There is a group of people in this House who, sometimes making themselves quite unpopular, have tried to come up with compromises to break the deadlock between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. I would have thought that, as grown-up men and women, we could do that. My right hon. Friend the Minister took an important and courageous role in going for the compromise of a regulated system, which I would have supported, because I believe that politics is about compromise, and on such an important issue, on which a vital minority have a great interest, compromise would have been the right way forward.

Alun Michael: Would my hon. Friend therefore urge Members in another place to engage with the Bill as it reaches them and make proposals, should they wish to do so, so that engagement between the two Houses can take place in the ordinary way? If that were to happen, the use of the Parliament Act would not be necessary.

Mr. Sheerman: I certainly urge colleagues in another place to be reasonable and to compromise, as long as
 
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that does not mean that whatever compromise they offer is simply bounced back or cast aside in this Chamber, and we get the same straight abolition all over again.

Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab): But has not the other House cast aside the views of this House by the way in which it has acted on this issue over many years?

Mr. Sheerman: This is not the easiest speech to make from this side. I have tried to make the case and to draw some parallels, but clearly we are not going to agree, and I do not want to try colleagues' patience any longer.

Lembit Öpik: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, for compromise to work, both sides must be willing to shift? When the Lords showed that they were willing to shift to an extent, there was no reciprocity on the part of those who favour a ban in this House. That is why stalemate ensued, but the upper House cannot be held responsible for that.

Mr. Sheerman: I take that point.

Finally, I appeal to hon. Members to step back for a moment. Those who have been here as long as I have care very much about the reputation of the House, of Parliament and of professional politicians. This does that reputation no good. Whatever their views on hunting, most people outside the House want to see fair play, and I do not think that people watching our debate and seeing the Parliament Act being invoked will think that the British sense of fair play is getting a fair crack of the whip. I am sorry to finish on this note. As long as there are not too many inflammatory speeches from the other side, I shall continue to vote against the Bill.

1.57 pm

Andrew George (St. Ives) (LD): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman). He made a courageous speech and demonstrated that he was genuinely wrestling with the arguments and the evidence to try to come to a judgment on the issues. I have come to a different view, from a different perspective, interestingly, because I come from the country and I used to follow and support the hunt, but, having considered all the issues, I now support a ban. He said that he had searched for evidence that there is a more humane way than hunting to deal with pest control, and so have I. I will not bore the House by repeating what I have said in Committee and in this Chamber about more humane ways of controlling pests in the countryside.

I also agree that there are many more important things for the House to spend its time on. We have debated this issue in and around the House for many hundreds of hours, and I think it would be improper for us to spend hundreds more going through a marathon course of Committee and consideration when the issues have already, in my view, been resolved.

I believe that the debate is not about hunting but about who runs the country and how it is run: is it run on the basis of primogeniture, birthright and what one might describe as the old boy network, or is it run on the basis of democracy? Which is the pre-eminent Chamber? In my view—and, I believe, the view of most hon. Members—the Commons is the pre-eminent
 
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Chamber. We have considered the issue and come to a conclusion on it. Many Bills are enacted on the basis of the votes of fewer than 50 per cent. of elected Members. Whatever the result of the electoral arithmetic when votes are taken, as long as the issues are concluded in a proper manner, I am happy for that to happen.

There is a great debate about the relevance of democracy here. Having been involved in Committee and the other stages when the last Bill was considered, I believe that it is important, now that the Bill has been brought back before us, that we read and reflect on the debate in the other place to see whether their Lordships produced any blinding flash, pearl of wisdom or indisputable fact that somehow passed us by in all the hundreds of hours that we spent considering the issues.

The forthcoming Second Reading debate will provide me with the opportunity to assess in greater detail some of the points raised in the other place and to establish whether they were new, interesting or relevant to our current debate. After all, the second Chamber—the lower Chamber, in my view—is a Chamber for revision, advice and sober second thought, not for obstruction or frustrating the will of the democratically elected House of Commons.

I will not identify individuals, but instead refer to column references in the House of Lords debate. On Second Reading on 16 September, one noble Lord said that our decision was

"an affront to the whole process of democracy"—[Official Report, House of Lords, 16 September 2003; Vol. 652, c. 840.]

That was a comment from an hereditary peer, so if we are an affront to democracy, what does that make him? Another noble Lord said:

"Democracy is the will of the people, not just members of another place."—[Official Report, 16 September 2003; Vol. 652, c. 782–83.]

The fact is that we have to weigh up the issues, consider all the evidence and reach a judgment on the basis of that evidence. We have had enough evidence to do so, and we should now spend as little time as is reasonably possible to come to our conclusion. The right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg), who is no longer in his place, argued that there was no urgency to push the issue through. However, several Members intervened to point out that although there is no greater urgency now than there was seven years ago—in the sense that nothing more significant is going to happen in the countryside now than was going to happen seven years ago—it is important for us to make progress on the issue. Given the process of perpetual obstruction from the other place, we have to reach the sad conclusion that the Minister is right and that, if necessary, we will have to invoke the Parliament Act.

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