[Part II]
Hunting Bill
6:30 pm
Mr John Gummer (Suffolk Coastal, Conservative)
That is a great gap in the way in which the Minister has argued his case. If he wished to base his case on rationality, he should have had such evidence, brought it to us and used it to convince the Committee. He has not done that.
There is a fourth basis on which the Minister could reasonably ask the Committee to support him. He could say that the clause is not especially moral, philosophic or rational, and that it has some impracticalities, but that it is consensual—the sort of measure that we can all gather round because we have to come to some agreement. He could have done that. This is where I find his protestations so difficult to accept. I know that you would discourage any suggestion of impropriety, Mrs. Roe, so I am not making any; but, although it may be my fault, I find it difficult to take the Minister's suggestion that he has brought before us a reasonable compromise that we are all unfair and unkind in not going along with. The truth is that that is not what he has brought, and we know that from his treatment of the Portcullis house hearing.
I have noticed that when the Minister knows that we are touching the truth, he loses his temper. When Jim Prior was about to be asked something difficult—I used to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary—I could tell that he was worried because he got a red neck. I knew when there was a palpable hit on Jim, and he would happily show his red neck to the people behind him—it would be very dangerous for a politician to become red at the front. The Minister also has an infallible gift. When he has been rumbled, he loses his temper. He does not forget losing his temper because it makes him cross that he has been cross, and he is therefore cross with the people who have made him cross.
On this issue, such behaviour is serious. In Portcullis house, no evidence was given by anyone to support the particular ''consensual position'' that the Minister has produced. Nobody suggested that there should be a change in the way in which utility should have been defined. Nobody suggested the dual arrangement that has been presented in the Bill. More importantly, nobody suggested that the system should apply to some mammals but not to others. The only merit to his proposal is that nobody agrees with it. It is not consensual; it is unique.
The Bill is all the Minister's own work. The problem is that he promised us that it would not be all his own work. Frankly, I talked about the Bill with some peppery, red-necked people, who said that they did not believe a word of it. I told them that he had said clearly that he would listen, that he had given three days of public hearings and that he had been perfectly fair in the way in which the dates were allocated. I took that to imply that he would base what he said on what he had heard. He appears to have meant that he would listen and then produce a clause that had no connection with the information that he heard during the three days.