Queen's Speech

Lord Monson Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monson]

My Lords, the gracious Speech emphasised the Government’s commitment to freedom, fairness and responsibility—an admirable set of objectives on which I congratulate the coalition. How do specific legislative proposals in the gracious Speech measure up to these criteria?

One of today’s themes is agriculture. The space allotted to agriculture in the Conservative manifesto was rather thin and insubstantial, as Alice Thomson pointed out in the Times shortly before the election. Many more words were devoted to conservation, biodiversity and so on than to the growing of food, the plight of the hill farmer and the like. However, right at the end a brief reference was made to the Hunting Act, saying, in essence, that it ought to be repealed because it has “proved unworkable”. Well, that is largely true, but it is scarcely the main reason for having it repealed. The main reason is that the Act flies in the face of the principles of freedom and fairness.

I have no interest to declare, as neither I nor any of my family hunts, but I know many people who do from a surprisingly wide occupational spectrum. They are understandably aggrieved that this part of our rural heritage has been outlawed because of a majority who were mainly guided by emotion rather than by a cool, objective examination of the evidence. Rest assured that I will certainly not try to go through all the arguments again, but the fact remains that the great majority of veterinary surgeons and other animal experts and no fewer than four former directors of the League Against Cruel Sports have come to the conclusion that hunting is the least cruel way of controlling the fox population and that, on balance, foxes have suffered more since the ban than before, to say nothing of the extra suffering to livestock arising from a larger fox population.

One accepts that freedom needs to be tempered with responsibility. The noble Baroness, Lady Golding, who sits on the Labour Benches, together with Mr Lembit Öpik, who until recently graced the Liberal Democrat Benches in the other place, as well as others, put an enormous amount of hard and constructive work into helping to form the Middle Way Group, which rightly seeks to discipline that small minority of hunts that condone abuses or show lack of consideration to third parties. That was not only wrong but disastrous for the image of hunting. The middle way is the British way and surely the route that we should follow.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, and everyone in this country who would like to see an end to the hunting ban are all too likely to be stymied by what is the complete reverse of fairness. Realistically, I see no problem from Northern Ireland. However, honourable Members representing Scottish constituencies are a different matter. The Scots, like the Northern Irish, have unfettered power to make their own laws for hunting on their own territory, but the English and Welsh are denied that right. Is that really fair? Surely it is not, as most of the electorate in Scotland and Northern Ireland would almost certainly agree. In the absence of long-overdue self-government for the English on purely domestic matters—that need not cost money, as there would be no need for hugely expensive Assembly buildings—one fears that repeal of the Hunting Act is unlikely in this Parliament unless all MPs representing Scottish and Northern Ireland constituencies were involuntarily to abstain in any Division on a hunting Bill, which I suspect is asking for the moon.

There are so many other Bad Laws, to use the name of an excellent book by Philip Johnston, that need repealing that it would take most of the night to list them, but let us hope that the coalition’s slogan—freedom, fairness and responsibility—is indeed a binding promise, not simply a vague aspiration to be discarded when convenient.