Clause 1 — Hunting wild mammals with dogs

Part of Hunting Bill – in the House of Commons at 9:30 pm on 16 November 2004.

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Photo of Tony Wright Tony Wright Labour, Cannock Chase 9:30, 16 November 2004

I speak as someone who dislikes blood sports intensely. I cannot understand why people engage in them and think that it demeans the human condition, so instinctively I am in favour of stopping them. It would also be politically convenient for me to sign up to the proposition that we should stop them.

When the argument started some years ago I set myself one test: to answer the question of whether there is something uniquely cruel about hunting with dogs that would justify banning it. If there was, I would have no hesitation in doing that and I would not be detained by the arguments that it would cause a loss of livelihood or encroach on liberties. I would have known the answer to those questions. However, as someone who instinctively wanted to be on that side, and who has sought to follow the arguments and to read the evidence, I have to say that that test has not been passed.

It is the deliberate lack of attention to the evidence that troubles me most. In addition, there is the suggestion that there is a superior moral sensibility on the part of those who want a complete ban. That cannot be right because people who have taken different views over the years have different moral sensibilities. Just down the road from Ogmore, Aneurin Bevan—a man who was neither deficient in class warriorship nor in moral sensibility—thought that a ban could not be justified.

The question is: if the test has not been passed—in a sense, the Minister acknowledged that—why should we persist in insisting on a ban rather than regulation? I can only think that it is either because we have got ourselves imprisoned in a position in which we think we have to do that or because we are implicitly saying that we have a greater sensibility on the cruelty issue than people who take a different view, and I simply reject that.

There is no question but that this House of Commons would be justified in applying the Parliament Act, in asserting its supremacy by doing what it wants to do and in eschewing any common ground by rejecting compromise. All that is possible. The question is whether it would be sensible. It would feel terribly exciting this week and people would march through the Lobby with a lighter step. However, one of the first laws of this place is that we should not do things that we know are undoable; we should not do things that we know are unenforceable; we should not do things that will not carry a substantial number of our population with us. If we do something knowing all that, with the evidential test not having been passed, I am afraid that in the long term there will be consequences that we shall all come to regret.

We can do that. I am sure that we shall do that. I have turned up here often to vote for the Bill. I am going to try to vote for it again tonight because it is sensible, but it will not be embraced. We will continue on the course that the House set some time ago. It can do it. It will do it. The question is whether it is sensible to do it.