Hunting Bill
6:00 pm
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire, Conservative)
There was indeed, but I understand that not many Government Members took advantage of it. The astonishing thing is that so many of them spent the whole of Second Reading explaining how much they hated the Bill, saying, ''The Bill is a bad Bill. This is disgraceful. Scandalous. We are going to amend it. We do not want this frightful Bill. It is absolutely ghastly.'' They heaped opprobrium on the head of the Minister. None the less, they voted in favour of a Bill that they had previously said was bad. That seems an odd way to behave on Second Reading, but we are not here to discuss that.
We must settle this issue, and there are several useful ways in which we could do so. The Conservatives have proposed a licence as a new schedule to the Bill. It is an extremely detailed two-page document that discusses every aspect of hunting with dogs. I, and I daresay others, would be perfectly happy to discuss the licence further and possibly to amend it during the Bill's passage through both Houses of Parliament, in the hope that, ultimately, we would have a licence that would allow hunting to continue under carefully laid down conditions.
After all, that is what has happened for 50 years on Government land; that is to say, on Ministry of Defence and Forestry Commission land. Over the past five or six years, Labour Ministers have probably signed licences to allow hunting to continue on Forestry Commission land. The Conservatives would be happy to consider something akin to that and, as a gesture of our good will, we have proposed the detailed two-page document. We are ready to discuss it further with those who seek to settle the matter. We are prepared to do that only if ''settle'' does not mean ban, because I suspect that that is what some have in mind; the Under-Secretary, from a sedentary position, has rather confirmed that.