Hunting Bill
4:30 pm
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire, Conservative)
That must indeed be the position of the Minister. I would not like to be arguing in favour of such a Bill, surrounded by people who made their total opposition to it known so very publicly on Second Reading. I have never encountered anything of the sort before. It is a brave position for the Minister to be in.
That brings us on to the proposed reordering of the consideration of the Bill. Logically, we would start with part 1—the offence would be a suitable place to start—and move on to part 2. The Minister has argued that because the principles of cruelty and utility are so central to what is being proposed, it makes sense to start there and to move on to the offence later. The Conservatives have accepted that argument; there is some reason and usefulness in it. I am grateful to the Minister for agreeing two things in that context.
The first is that, as we made plain, under our consideration of cruelty and utility, we must be allowed to discuss those principles as applied not only to hunting foxes and hares with hounds, but to hunting deer, which technically speaking does not come under that part, and to hare coursing, rabbiting and ratting. It seems to us important, as the scientists in Portcullis house agreed, that all kinds of hunting of mammals with dogs should be considered at the same time and in the same way, and that the principles of utility and cruelty should be applied to all three groups of mammals. The Minister has agreed that, after consideration of the programme motion, we can discuss stag hunting, hare coursing, rabbiting and ratting in a debate on clause 8 starting on Thursday.
The Minister has also generously agreed that, irrespective of what happens to clause 8 on Thursday and subsequently—we hope that it will be amended, and it may well be removed for all that I know—we should continue to use the cruelty and utility principles when we come to discuss hare coursing, stag hunting, rabbiting and ratting under part 1. With those assurances, we have agreed to his proposed reordering. We are also grateful to him for agreeing that the first substantial discussion should take place on Thursday.
After thinking about the matter over Christmas, I have something on which the Minister might be happy to answer a simple question. Call me Machiavellian or a conspiracy theorist, but let us imagine for one second that those who surround him on his Benches are seeking to remove those parts of the Bill that do anything other than ban hunting with dogs. Certainly, no less an organ than The Guardian suggested over Christmas that that was the case. Let us imagine that the Minister's colleagues want to ban everything else. They just might seek to amend clause 1 to do that, or to have a whole variety of clauses withdrawn. In that case, the Minister would not have the opportunity to discuss his much-loved golden thread of cruelty and utility.
I should be happy if the Minister wanted to put me right on this, but one wonders whether the reordering was not simply connected with the pure intellectual aim of dealing first with the central issues, but was tactical because he had heard from one or two of his hon. Friends what they intended to do to the Bill.