Hunting Bill
4:30 pm
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire, Conservative)
I am not sure why that should astonish the Minister. The Countryside Alliance is a wonderful organisation and we work closely with it. It supports the principles that we seek to uphold in this Committee, so it should not be a revelation that we work closely with it, the Middle Way Group, the National Farmers Union, the Country Land and Business Association and most other organisations that are concerned about the countryside and animal welfare in this country, unlike the Labour mob opposite.
The press release that I issued this afternoon stated that we are ready to work carefully with the Government in this Committee and to seek to turn what we believe to be a badly flawed, unworkable and bureaucratic Bill into some sort of workmanlike Bill that is in the best interests of the countryside and hunting. The Minister is right; I am ready to work with him. I hope that he will listen carefully to our arguments and to a reasonable number of our amendments—I think that we have tabled 100 so far—and I hope that he will be ready to find ways of turning a very bad and complex Bill into a much more workmanlike means of ordering hunting in the countryside.
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the Conservatives are opposed to the Bill on principle. We believe that it is bad and unnecessary and will interfere with a way of life in the countryside. Nobody needs or wants that. Today, on the Floor of the House, the Secretary of State for Defence talked about deploying troops to Iraq and the fact that we are facing a war. To echo the Prime Minister's new year's message, we will face all kinds of horrors in the year ahead. I simply fail to understand why on earth we should be considering this nonsense today. None the less, the Conservatives are ready to discuss the matter with the Minister and convert this into a workmanlike and common sense Bill.
The Conservatives welcome the fact that the Bill implicitly recognises the continuing and central role and usefulness of hunting with dogs in the countryside, particularly in relation to controlling vermin. That is an important concession from the Government. The Government are led by the Prime Minister, and the Bill is proposed by the Prime Minister. For the first
time, the Government have conceded that there is a use for hunting with dogs in the countryside.
We welcome that concession and we intend to work with the Government to turn that change and fundamental support for hunting with dogs into something workmanlike. [Interruption.] I think that the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) referred to using dogs for flushing. He obviously has not read the Bill, which does not refer at all to the use of hounds for flushing out vermin. That is happening in Scotland; his friends in Scotland did that. The Bill does not refer to the use of hounds for flushing out to guns, with the sole exception of a reference to no more than two dogs. The Under-Secretary is quite wrong. He had better read the Bill before he gets stuck into discussing it. [Interruption.] If the Under-Secretary wants to intervene, I will happily give way. My understanding is that, from a sedentary position, he referred to the use of dogs for flushing out. If that is his understanding of what is in the Bill, he is wrong. The Bill does not refer to that.