King’s Speech

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is with genuine pleasure that I congratulate my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, on his maiden speech. It was informative, eloquent and deeply moving.

I have known the noble Lord for nearly 20 years and have watched him grow from a rather shy young man, a little conscious of his northern roots—perhaps too conscious—to someone who now knows what he wants to achieve. He can be very proud of what he has already achieved. His deep love for his family is evident, and I know how much he depends on the support from his wife Clare. I am not sure whether he has ever told Clare, but, years ago, I tried to matchmake Ben with a very beautiful young woman. I was completely unsuccessful; of course, he was just waiting for Clare to come along.

The noble Lord has, in a relatively short time, been privy to some of the most extraordinary events in politics in our country. At London’s City Hall, he was with the Mayor of London for eight years. As I, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and others know—I worked with the mayor as the unpaid sports commissioner—behind the scenes, he was instrumental in making so many things happen when sometimes it looked as though they would not happen. He was crucial to the mayor’s very successful two terms in office—whatever you think of Boris Johnson.

He continued working with the then Prime Minister, first in the Foreign Office and then in Downing Street, so he lived through the entire leaving the EU saga—always behind the scenes, but he is one of the very few who knows where all the bodies are buried. I am sure that we all can breathe a sigh of relief that, thankfully, the noble Lord is one of the most discreet and decent people in public life. He assures me that he is not writing a book.

Noble Lords should know that he is definitely not a tribal politician; indeed, he could not in any way be described as just another boring politician. He will be another voice here for freedom of speech, tolerance and saying it how it is. I look forward, as we all do, to his future contributions.

Following on from the noble Lord’s remarks on the environment, I too welcome the ban on animal exports. Sadly, it will not apply to Northern Ireland, for the sole reason that this Government have abandoned part of the UK to the rules of the EU, and the EU, disgracefully, does not seem to have any care for the animals suffering on long journeys just to be slaughtered. I say here that we also need more local abattoirs.

In discussing the environment, I will mention a word that has become very trendy but without a great deal of discussion: “rewilding”. It is well intentioned but threatens active harm to our natural environment. All of us see the devastation caused by the worst excesses of human activity and we want to see it undone. As someone brought up on a small farm run on organic principles long before the word “organic” was even thought of, I believe that we should be much tougher on the companies and others responsible for those who pollute our rivers and discharge sewage.

However, rewilding in its fuller sense is a different matter and means different things to different people. The basic problem with rewilding is that it suggests a reversion to some previous state. The problem of course is: which state? What are we rewilding to? Landscapes across the UK have been shaped for centuries by people. It was people who transformed the wildernesses into land that still produces so much of our food. We should be producing more and more, and we should still have a Minister of Agriculture.

It was people who created a thriving rural ecosystem that underpins the UK’s biodiversity strengths, and it was people who have, in doing all this, curated our landscapes as diligently as those who manage the galleries that now house paintings by Constable—that great artist who depicted those landscapes in all their majesty—which we love. Rewilding those landscapes would not mean a reversion to some state of imagined perfection, a mythical past of dark, dramatic forests and endless fields of wild flowers. Ours is not a mythical world but a real world, and applying romantic and emotional ideas in the real world may comfort those who advocate it, but can prove disastrous.

I will give one example. The Hunting Act, passed nearly 20 years ago, was supported by many for what they thought were sound animal welfare reasons. Many of us here warned this would not happen and now we have been vindicated, as we know from the publication just last week of a brilliant book called Rural Wrongs: Hunting and the Unintended Consequences of Bad Law. Written by environmental journalist Charlie Pye-Smith and helped by former League Against Cruel Sports director Jim Barrington, it argues that instead of benefiting wild animals, the precise opposite has occurred. Life for the fox, the brown hare and the red deer of Exmoor is now far worse, their status having been reduced to that of a pest. Those who campaigned and supported this detrimental law have not spent a penny in assessing its impact. We said it would be bad and now we can prove it.

The rewilding argument tells us to ignore similar warnings and wilfully permit the destruction of the landscapes we love. There are better solutions. Farmers and land managers are the best environmental champions we have. England has three-quarters of the world’s chalk streams, and the British Isles have the most heather moorland in the world. These are globally rare, globally significant habitats, and we should be cherishing, celebrating and promoting them, not abandoning them for the sake of a slogan and a brand. If we are serious about reversing biodiversity loss, people and rural communities are key to the solution. Yes, of course solar power is important in the overall policy of climate change, but we should not be so intoxicated by the objective that we allow it to also desecrate our countryside. There are plenty of places to put solar other than on fertile farmland where we should be growing food. Responsible and organised species reintroductions are one thing, but abandoning environmental management would do nothing for the future of the countryside—we need it managed. Government should be empowering and encouraging the managers.

I am so glad that in His Majesty’s gracious Speech there was not one mention of rewilding.