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Lord Whitty: My Lords, I said that I will always vote for something that is both long-standing Labour Party policy and which has, on successive occasions, been overwhelmingly voted for by the democratically elected House. I stand by that.
The Earl of Onslow: My Lords, in other words the noble Lord is perfectly happy to vote against the House of Commons. We have established that.
Last night, I was on a television programme with Mr. Gordon Prentice. There was a bit of a ding-dong but Andrew Neil chaired it well. It all hinged on one remark. I said something and Mr. Prentice responded, "Jolly hockey sticks". We all turned on him and said, "You're not talking about cruelty. Battery chicken farming is more cruel. You are talking about class envy". To that, Mr. Prentice had no answer.
It is amusing, if not slightly sickening, that we can have a modern Parliament advocating abortion. We know that can involve six-month foetuses being chopped up in the womb and destroyed. We have a modern Parliament advocating the repeal of Section 28.
We have a saint of hunting and yet we have an urge to ban it. That is a very interesting moral change which has occurred recently. One thing is yesterday's moral certitudes, something different is today's moral certitudes and something different again will be tomorrow's moral certitudes. But there is, I suggest, one overriding thing for which English Parliaments were founded and which is their primary duty; namely, to protect the liberty of the Queen's subjects.De Tocqueville writes of the tyranny of the majority over the minority. If the ban is accepted, it will comprise a tyranny imposed on a minority through class envy and crass sentimentality. I accept, however, that many people find some aspects of hunting, to their way of mind, wrong. Therefore, it seems to me totally sensible to follow the advice of the noble Baroness, Lady Golding. I wish that I had made her speech as it was excellent. The liberty argument is so strong. Parliament should protect liberty arguments. I do not like using the word "fascism"; I heard a noble Lord say something about that earlier. It is a word which one should use extremely rarely. However, if Parliament imposes tyrannies on large minorities, it is going down that road. We are heirs of a phenomenal tradition of liberty and freedom. Do not let us throw it away.
I now turn extremely briefly to my noble friends all over the House who are thinking of voting for supervision. I say to them, "Please don't", not because I would prefer it, as I would, but because the middle way offers everyone a way out. It offers the Government a way out. They can say that they have tried and that they accept the liberty argument. They can also say that they accept the arguments and the feelings of the "antis" and will not sacrifice that on the ground of liberty but will go half-way down that road. If we vote overwhelmingly for that option, we shall send out a message. Therefore, do not let us vote, or even move, the third way. I do not say that because I do not prefer it, as I do. I say that because tactically and politically it would be wrong to do so. If, however, the Government do not accept the olive branch and the sensible compromise produced by the statesman, the noble Baroness, Lady Golding, the Countryside Alliance will have a million people on the street. Then there will be an argument. There is a middle way: that is the English way; that is Parliament's way and that is the sensible way. I urge it upon noble Lords.
2.53 p.m.
The Duke of Montrose: My Lords, I am a ready apologist for the present culture of rural life. As noble Lords know, I have an interest in the countryside. I have partaken in many field sports, but not, I emphasise, hunting on horseback. I have a farm and estate. In the interests of that, and five or six farms round about, we have at times killed up to 100 foxes a year in an effort to protect the livestock. I hope that they were all killed in the most efficient and least cruel fashion. I firmly believe that the people I employed to do that were skilled in that way.
Yesterday a number of Members in another place said that they just could not understand how anyone could take pleasure in killing a wild animal. However,
many people do. The noble Lord, Lord Hardy of Wath, emphasised that point earlier. I draw noble Lords' attention to one or two examples of that: small boys out with an air rifle; people with high-powered shotguns who shoot at and often wound geese and wildfowl with no sense of the suffering experienced by wounded animals, or who turn up with powerful searchlights and do the same thing to deer at night. I am aware of all those activities from personal experience.However, as regards the basic issues at stake here, there is a challenge in the search, there is skill in the chase and there is the reward of possession in the kill. That occurs whether the operation is conducted legally or illegally. My noble friend Lady Byford spoke of law enforcement.
We have a revealing example in the 1997 amendment to the Firearms Act 1968 of how legislating with the best intentions for a wholesale ban can produce entirely the wrong result. We have prohibited all possession of handguns and implemented rigorous efforts to reduce the number of legally held firearms. The perhaps unintended result of that is that the influence, and possibly even the authority, of the responsible citizen has been reduced and the criminal feels at greater liberty to do as he wishes. It may not be entirely coincidence that we have now seen in the 21st century the reintroduction of the highwayman who stops people and robs them. Since that legislation was passed, the number of crimes involving handguns has gone up, not down.
The only way to keep the suffering of wild animals to a minimum is to have sufficient numbers of people involved in a legitimate activity on the ground to provide the eyes and ears and, if necessary, the authority to prevent the activity of those who will inevitably operate outside the law. The Scottish Parliament has just passed the Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act, which is an effort to end hunting with hounds while at the same time allowing for the necessary control of pests. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, drew to your Lordships' attention the amount of time that was taken trying to draw up a workable and reasonable measure. The Act has 12 clauses and a schedule which are all very convoluted and involved. It was classed as unworkable by the committee which had to look at it. However, the Scottish Parliament insisted on that matter.
As your Lordships are probably aware, there will now be arguments as to whether it breaches Articles 1, 8, 11 or 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. There is also considerable doubt as to what kind of hunting it will prevent. If protecting wild mammals is the purpose, why should falconry be exempt as opposed to hare coursing? Anyone who has been on a moor and seen the way in which a grouse will allow itself practically to be trodden on before it flies up if a hen harrier has flown past in the previous half hour, will realise what fear can be generated in animals and mammals by birds of prey.
Under the Scottish Act, because a fox is classed as a pest, one is allowed "using a dog" to flush it from cover when one proposes to have it shot or killed. If the dog
happens to catch the fox and kill it, one has not committed an offence. How far is the dog allowed to chase it if one has missed or wounded it? Perhaps the crime occurs if one flushes it out with two dogs. A similar situation applies to roe deer. Because one might be interested in killing them for food, one is allowed to flush them from cover with a dog such as a lurcher.I shall not bore your Lordships with all the other anomalies that seem to emerge from that Act. One can only say that in the near future there will need to be produced a further volume of Halsbury's Laws, or something similar, that the average countryman can carry in his backpack whenever he goes out with a dog.
The noble Baroness, Lady Golding, vividly described some of the needs for the control of vermin that are required and which I do not believe are fully addressed in what has been proposed. There was an attempt to deal with them in the Scottish Bill but that was found to be very difficult and a solution has not yet been found.
3 p.m.
Lord Fyfe of Fairfield: My Lords, I shall be brief. It seems to me that this subject has been exhausted and I have no wish to detain noble Lords any longer than is necessary.
I do not claim to be an expert on hunting but I do claim to have some knowledge of the subject. The fox has few, if any, redeeming qualities. It is a ruthless and destructive predator, a pest and a squalid nuisance and it must be controlled. But does it deserve to be literally hounded to death?
I should declare an interest at this point. I was, until fairly recently, chairman of the Co-operative Group—CWS—which is the largest active farmer in the land. It banned fox hunting and all forms of hunting with animals in the mid-1980s. I live in Leicestershire, the heart of fox hunting country, and my experience was not particularly pleasant. Social invitations were declined, eyes were averted and backs were turned because I happened to be the chairman of an organisation that had banned fox hunting. I know people who hunt and many people who follow hunts. Incidentally, they are not all "toffs", whatever that means.
I pride myself on respecting the other man's point of view and I trust that he in return will respect mine. I witnessed a hunt in the 1980s, prior to the CWS banning fox hunting, to see for myself what actually happens. I was a member of a group that contained several children of varying ages. We had the misfortune to be in at the kill. For those children, it was a harrowing and traumatic experience. Imagine the questions they asked. I give an example. Why would civilised human beings allow another creature to be torn apart in full public view?
Those who say that there are greater priorities have a point. However, we banned bear baiting and cock fighting when we had greater social priorities than we have now. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, referred to that.
I shall not press the point about the manner of controlling the fox population. We all acknowledge that it needs controlling, but it should be done in a humane and compassionate way. I do not know the merits or de-merits of gassing, poisoning or shooting. All I know is that it cannot be beyond the wit of man to devise some process that is much more effective and less cruel than tearing an animal to pieces.
My noble friend Lord Harrison made many points about drag hunting. As he did so very effectively, I shall not discuss it except to say that it appears to be a way of preserving the sport and removing the cruelty. It is a course of action that I, a countryman myself, would like to see adopted. It would preserve the pleasure and take away the inhumanity.
People have talked at length about the various means of controlling the fox. I do not know whether anyone here or anyone else is ever likely to ask a dead fox what it was like to be torn apart. Indeed, I do not know of anyone who would be capable of asking a fox—and the fox would not be capable of answering—about its preferred means of death. I suggest that if we had the ability to ask such questions and the creature had the ability to answer, being torn apart by dogs would not be at the top of the list.
By allowing hunting in its present form, each one of us participates in the process. I do not want to participate in that process. I believe that by demeaning living creatures, we are—all of us—ultimately demeaning ourselves.
3.5 p.m.
Lord Willoughby de Broke: My Lords, I begin by reminding noble Lords of my interests. I hunt with the Warwickshire hunt, I support fox hunting and I am chairman of St Martin's Magazines, which publishes Country Illustrated and Hunting magazines.
I am most grateful to Mr Stephen Byers for giving us the opportunity to debate this matter. I should obviously regret it if at any stage I appear ungrateful. I differ from those noble Lords who made critical comments about the timing of this debate. This is a good opportunity to air some of the issues and to expose some of the inaccuracies and falsehoods that have been perpetrated by those who would ban fox hunting. It is important to nail what I can only call the lie at the centre of the case to ban hunting. The noble Lord, Lord Hardy, did that very well when he described the difficulties that are associated with other methods of control. Many noble Lords have discussed that and I shall not go into details. I thought that the speech of the noble Lord was very telling in that respect.
My noble friend Lady Fookes wheeled out our old friend the crack marksman, who will dispose of foxes so efficiently. Our experience of crack marksmen during the foot and mouth epidemic exploded that myth. We saw the horrors of so-called marksmen going around shooting cattle and sheep and creating the most frightful havoc—wounding, failing to kill and missing. That is the future of the crack marksman. That experience gives us no confidence that crack marksmen
will do any better trying to control foxes. If those crack marksmen are unable to hit a cow in broad daylight, how will they hit a much smaller target at night?Moreover, when the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill comes into force, the situation will be even worse. Are we really going to allow deranged marksmen to go around with high-powered rifles at night and shoot willy-nilly? The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is not in his place but he should look out. He was a great supporter of the right to roam at night in order to find a mountain to climb. He had better be jolly careful or he will find himself in the sights of some licensed marksman wearing a baseball CAP with "Offox" written on it!
The real difficulty with this whole debate is that those who wish to ban fox hunting engage in the debate only on their own terms. They want a simple ban; they will not look beyond that or consider controls. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, said, "Fox hunting is cruel and I therefore want it banned". He went on to discuss the option of controlling foxes by shooting with a rifle. He suggested that that method was preferred in the Burns report. However, nowhere in that report, so far as I can see, does any conclusion suggest that fox hunting is cruel. I defy the noble Lord to find a reference in the Burns report that says that fox hunting is cruel. It does not say that anywhere. Therefore, the only conclusion to draw is that fox hunting is not cruel.
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