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Dr. Palmer: Although I sympathise up to a point, does not my hon. Friend feel that he is being a little harsh? Tonight, for the first time, we have the opportunity and the realistic prospect of banning hunting for good. We have the Labour Government to thank for that. They have taken too long over it, but we have got there.
Mr. Steinberg: That is one way of looking at it. No, I do not think I am being too harsh. We have had an opportunity since 1997. We have had a majority of more than 100 in the House for the past six years, we made a commitment, and we have not carried it out. I am delighted with the situation tonight but no, I do not think I have been too harsh. I have raised the matter many a time with my hon. Friend the Minister for the Environment. In fact, I have stopped buying him drinks because of his attitude towards it.
Dr. Stoate: Given the overwhelming majority of hon. Members who have expressed a clear opinion on what they want—a total ban on such a cruel and barbaric sport—would it not have been better if the Bill had been constructed in Committee to allow that to happen with the minimum fuss and bother, so that we could all have got what we wanted with far less trouble than we have had this evening?
Mr. Steinberg: Absolutely right. That is the point that I was trying to make. If the Committee had done its job properly—I do not mean that disrespectfully towards the Committee—if it had not been brainwashed and bullied, we would not be in the situation that we are in tonight. The debate could have been over quickly and we could all have been home now.
There have been several approaches since 1997, which have frustrated my constituents, me and the general public because of the lack of commitment by the Government to the promise that they made many years ago. The issue may be of low priority, but its political significance is very great. However, being an optimistic chap, I was delighted when I heard that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality, the newly promoted DEFRA Minister, was to introduce yet another hunting Bill. I was delighted and very confident, because he had served on the previous hunting Bill and had made a good defence of the abolition of hunting, so I was certain that he would find a way forward and resolve the issue cleanly and clearly.
However, I was to be bitterly disappointed. In December 2002, DEFRA introduced a Bill that turned around the objectives of previous Bills on hunting with dogs and offered a ban on hunting, with provision for licensed and humane pest control. No one wanted to take away the rights of farmers to protect their stock.
The Bill introduced for the first time proposals to license fox hunting. I was bemused. If I recollect correctly, the House clearly rejected a licensing system in 2001 when the then Home Secretary, now the Foreign Secretary, proposed his options Bill, which was defeated heavily in the House.I pay tribute to colleagues who served on the Committee, who attempted to reverse the objectives back to a focus on pest control. They succeeded to a degree, but we are left with a Bill that allows the licensing of the chasing of foxes and of mink.Many constituents cannot and will not understand how the House of Commons can justify introducing different welfare standards for different wild animals, especially as we have spent more than 120 hours debating the issue each time with the same result. Hunting serves no useful purpose, is cruel and should be banned.
As we can see this evening, the Bill has come out of Committee pleasing no one. It is a typical liberal fudge, hoping to appease the fox hunters and those who support abolition. In essence, the Bill will do the opposite of what it intends. As we see this evening, it has alienated everyone in all parties. One cannot please everyone and be sincere, unless of course one is a Liberal when attempting to do that. I should not be nasty; some of them will be supporting us tonight.
There is no middle way of licensing. A document posted to me recently from a Reverend Professor Linzey from Oxford university—I had never heard of him— contained an interesting quote. He said:
- "Licensing does not resolve the issue. It devolves it from Parliament (where the decision should be taken) to a three-member tribunal who will decide on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, licensing by definition authorises what was not authorised before. It therefore legitimises hunting, gives it authority and legal standing. Licensing is a step backwards—not a step forwards."
Mr. Steinberg: I will not. The hon. Gentleman has had a good say today. I want to get on because others want to get in.
Licensing has done nothing to abolish fox hunting, which clearly the Bill set out to do. The Bill has banned hare coursing and hunting and deer hunting, but not fox hunting, which was the prime aim in the first place. Fox hunting was the core issue and it has been ignored. If it is wrong to hunt hare and deer, I cannot for the life of me understand why it is not wrong to hunt foxes and mink. It is not logical to me.
A while ago I watched the Prime Minister promise on television to ban fox hunting. It is now all a matter of trust and those who put their trust in the Government to ban fox hunting must not be let down. Not to deliver would be a further nail in the coffin of this Government. The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) used the word "ratted". That will be an apt word if the Bill does not go through this evening with a total ban.
The Government and the Prime Minister promised that the decision made by this House would be respected and accepted and that, if necessary, the Parliament Act would be used if the Bill failed to pass through the House
of Lords. If this promise is not kept, we on this side of the House will suffer the consequences at the ballot box, and rightly so. The Government must not try to wriggle out of the commitment that they have given to pacify a loud but tiny minority.Many questions need to be asked. Why did the Bill not provide the fox with the same protection as deer and hare? Why could not the Bill have been drafted so as to give protection to these wild mammals while providing pest control measures? What evidence do we have that a ban with sensible measures would not be passed or supported by the Government? Why do we read or hear that any move to tighten the Bill might result in the Parliament Act not being used? I am delighted to say that my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton has wheedled out of the Government this evening that, regardless of how the Bill leaves the House this evening, it will qualify for the Parliament Act. That is a step forward.
The Committee significantly strengthened the Bill, but it still allows the registrar to issue a licence for hunters to chase and kill mink and foxes. How can I go back to my constituents and party workers and state that hunting is banned, when we know that very soon—if the Bill stays as the Committee left it—we will see television footage of the first successful applicant hunt going out in its normal way?
That will not help build the trust that the Government are so keen to restore. If I were standing at the next election, I would be very anxious about the number of votes that I would lose on this issue. I, and many of my colleagues, have signed countless pledges and early-day motions, not to mention voting for a ban on at least three other occasions. No doubt many colleagues have also written letter after letter expressing support for and commitment to an outright ban on hunting with dogs.
Indeed, I remind the House—[Interruption.] I am coming to an end now. I have sat here for five hours, and now I am going to have my say. I remind the House of the Minister's speech in the Commons, before his return to the Government, in which he stated:
- "It is entirely wrong to think that a licensing system, giving rise to all sorts of bureaucracy and complications, would resolve the problems relating to animal welfare and caused by animal cruelty."—[Official Report, 27 February 2001; Vol. 363, c. 836.]
Mr. Soames: That was as depressing and ignorant a speech as I have heard in the past 20 years—a turgid, ignorant recital of prejudice of the worst sort.
I want to cover three points relating to new clause 13. First, I want to quote from a letter from Dr. Lewis Thomas, a vet, who is the secretary of a group of vets, numbering 520 members of the Royal College of
Veterinary Surgeons. I hope that the Minister will listen to the quotation, considering his sham interest in animal welfare. The letter says:
- "Be assured therefore that any legislation that bans or seriously restricts hunting the four quarry species cannot be regarded as having the welfare of wild animals as its primary objective. In fact, such legislation will cause unnecessary suffering, albeit largely unseen by a sensitive public, for which these legislators will be responsible."
Many of my colleagues and I, along with hundreds of thousands of people in this country, support hunting. I join the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) in paying tribute to the many women of all ages in Parliament square who have come to demonstrate and show their feelings under the banner of Families for Hunting, in some frightful weather, about the terrible thing that the House is about to do.
I feel a terrible sense of betrayal. The six-month consultation undertaken by DEFRA, which was meant to be so fair and even-handed, with a Minister who was prepared to listen, has turned out to be nothing but a cynical sham and a fraud. Personally, I always believed that it would be so, and I said so at the time, but it was right to enter into it in a wholehearted way because of the assurances that we were given by the Minister. It has turned out to be a most disgraceful sham.
The new clause merely consolidates the Committee stage bans on hare hunting and the use of dogs below ground, as well as the original ban on deer hunting. It seems extraordinary to impose a closed season on fox hunting from 1 August to the end of October, which is precisely the time when the hunts can do the maximum pest control. It is when the greatest amount of good is done—when the cubs are dispersed more widely across the countryside, when the farmers can be assured that some of the cubs will be killed, and when the end result is a much better ordered and better balanced countryside.
This restriction is wholly unjustified and absolutely unnecessary. It is quite contrary to anything in the Burns report, and it is clear that there is no apparent reason, other than political expediency, for the Minister to introduce such a measure. As I said, we are talking about a time when the Masters of Foxhounds Association's packs account for about 40 per cent. of its annual cull. This measure is blatantly discriminatory. Why is fox hunting banned during these months, and not other methods of control? All the major land management organisations in England and Wales recognise the need for fox control and support the status quo.
One of the most shameful aspects of the lengthy deliberations in Committee was the Government's persistent refusal to accept, or to pay attention to, any of the amendments that were tabled in completely good faith. At a time when it is important to improve the agri-environmental systems in this country, it was particularly astonishing that all the proposals that were made on environmental grounds were dispatched as if they stood for naught. I hope that the Minister can assure me that the Government paid attention to the excellent independent study on field sports and conservation produced by the Durrell institute of
conservation and ecology at the university of Kent. The study concludes:
- "We found that landowners participating in field sports maintained the most established woodland and planted more new woodland and hedgerows than those who did not, despite the equal availability of subsidies. Therefore voluntary habitat management appears to be important for biodiversity conservation in Britain. Current debates on the future of field sports in Britain, and similar activities globally, may benefit from considering their utility as incentives to conserve additional habitat on private land".
- "Exmoor National Park Authority is concerned that a ban on the hunting of deer with hounds would represent a very significant change in the management of the wild deer herd on Exmoor which, as the earlier sections of the evidence explain, might adversely affect the future sustainability of the herd, and by extension a much valued aspect of Exmoor's cultural heritage. It would also have a serious impact on the social and economic well being of its rural communities. In this way it could put the National Park Authority's own statutory purposes and duties at risk."
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