Fur Trade

Roger Gale Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. The number of hon. Members present shows the breadth of support, and the petition shows that it is consistent across the country. It has also been a response to some strong campaigns. There have been 109,554 signatures to the petition, but there is a spectrum of support behind it from significant organisations, including the Humane Society International; businesses such as Lush; and a range of cultural figures such as Brian May of Queen and Evanna Lynch of “Harry Potter”. It is fair to conclude that our country wants to ban fur.

It is not just the UK. Last week I had the pleasure of meeting a Finnish member of the European Parliament, Sirpa Pietikäinen, who leads the cross-party group on animal welfare. She assured me that there is growing and widespread support not just in the Parliament but in countries that have traditionally been more sympathetic to the fur trade.

The faux fur issue is an added complexity that is currently being probed by the EFRA Committee. The public are being duped into buying fur by mistake. We have a bizarre situation where less scrupulous retailers, or retailers that have been misled by wholesalers or people further down the supply chain, mislabel their products as faux fur when in fact they are real fur. That is partly a consequence of the fact that, from some suppliers, the real fur is very cheap, which says a lot about how it is produced.

[Sir Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)]

The nub of this particular item on the hon. Gentleman’s agenda is that it is perfectly possible for anybody half-bright to tell the difference between faux fur and real fur. It is done all the time. The fact is that it is because it is cheap that this material is brought into the country and sold by supposedly reputable outlets. They are conning the public. Should we not throw the book at the people doing that?

[Daniel Zeichner]

I will agree and disagree with the hon. Gentleman. It is absolutely right that we look hard at the people doing that, but in some cases it is not necessarily easy to tell. Hon. Members who were shown examples at the exhibition in the House a few weeks ago saw that, if it is only one or two pieces disguised within a wider piece, it is hard to tell. Some are very cheap indeed—fur bobble hats keep turning up in this context. The consumer is unlikely to know that fur is in the product. It is important that we crack down on those retailers, but to do so we must have a system. That means giving trading standards officers across the country support and resources.

Of course, if we ban fur imports in general, customers will no longer be in the position of buying what they think is fake but is actually real. Many organisations that made submissions to the EFRA Committee’s inquiry on the fur trade lamented the inadequate fur labelling regime we have in this country, which leads to some of that mis-selling. Hopefully, from that Committee’s work, we will see some practical recommendations.

It is worth noting in passing that the evidence from both the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to the Select Committee noted that the Government have not carried out any assessment of the size of the fur trade in the UK. That could show either a lack of diligence on the Government’s part, or that the contribution to the UK economy is of no great significance. I suggest it is probably the latter.

The hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) asked whether we can ban fur should we wish to. The advice I have been given is that we can. Straying into trade territory, which is slightly controversial at the moment, I am told that the World Trade Organisation rules contain article XX (a), which provides an exception to the trading rules for measures that are necessary “to protect public morals”. In 2010, the European Parliament and Council banned trade in seal products in the European Union. That led in 2015 to a challenge from Canada and Norway, which fell when the WTO upheld the right of the EU to prohibit trade in seal products because it was a proportionate measure necessary to protect public morals. That may not be quite the terminology we would use, but hon. Members will get the drift. That important case indicates that WTO members have the freedom to define—with proof—their interpretation of that phrase.

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[Kerry McCarthy]

I would be more than happy to support the hon. Gentleman in calling for a ban on live exports. At the moment, I understand there is a ban on animals being taken overseas for slaughter, but not for fattening. That seems to me to be a strange distinction. Surely we ought to be stamping out the exporting and transporting of animals in inhumane, cramped conditions.

I want to briefly mention the evidence we saw in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. Some people might argue that it is up to individual members of the public to exercise choice as to whether they want to boycott products that contain animal fur or shops that sell such products. Humane Society International’s recent investigations have shown that mislabelling of real fur as fake fur, or fur products having no labelling at all, is rife on the high street, whether by active disregard or innocent oversight. Complex, multi-country and subcontracted supply chains mean that shops often just do not know what is in their products by the time they arrive in the UK.

I was reassured by the evidence from the likes of Amazon, which seemed truly committed to trying to stamp out real fur sales. It talked about tightening up a lot of processes. Obviously it was trying to put the best gloss on that, but I felt it was genuine in its desire to address this.

[Sir Roger Gale]

I sought to make this point earlier, but I will make it again. We must not and cannot absolve the retailers from their duty of care. It is absolutely vital that people understand that this trade is revolting and that they should have no part of it.

[Kerry McCarthy]

That is exactly why the Select Committee took evidence from the likes of Amazon and Camden Market. A lot of these items are found on market stalls, but they have also been found in shops such as Boots, Tesco, FatFace, Groupon, House of Fraser and Missguided—well-established chains that need to get their own houses in order. Some of them had explicit fur-free promises, which they need to live up to.

I reject, too, any claims from the fur lobby about its “Welfur” mark. On two occasions—once at the APPG on animal welfare, and once when the fur lobby gave evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee—I have heard that a cruelty-free version of fur is on offer, but the fur trade is a cruel, ugly business, no matter how it is dressed up and marketed, and no matter how glamorous the end products or the people who might wear them are.

I implore the Minister to take heed of this debate and to recognise that it is indicative of much wider public support for a ban. He is a great enthusiast for Brexit, so whether or not we are allowed to do it under current rules, I hope he sees it as something that we can do in future.

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[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. Let me start by making it clear that I hate, and have hated for all my thinking life—which might be quite short, I do not know—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) knows me too well. I have always hated the fur trade. It is interesting that the debate has not divided on party grounds. It is a rather philosophical debate, because this is one of the few issues that appears to unite vegan and carnivore—the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and I appeared on a BBC politics programme the other week to discuss the dairy sector. It also unites people with diametrically opposed views on country sports; indeed, it unites people with diametrically opposed views on all sorts of issues.

I slightly stand aside from the narrative of animal rights, because the giving of rights is a peculiar legal minefield. However, what trumps even that issue is our human duties, responsibilities and response to public morality. I start always by asking this question—is the fur trade actually needed? My judgment is that it is not.

Frankly, I could not care less about how marvellous the standards are for animals, or—more usually—how bad the standards are. It is the principle of farming for fur that I find so objectionable. Animals could be put up in the animal equivalent of the Ritz hotel; they could be given room service 24/7; and they could be killed in the most humane way possible, even being tickled to death by a swan’s feather, so that they go out laughing. The principle would still be wrong. So, to those who talk about the “fur fair” campaign and such things, I think that is totally the wrong line of argument to deploy. We should ask ourselves, “In the 21st century, is this a trade that we want to see?”

Of course, regarding the wearing of fur, one can go back to the sumptuary Acts of the Tudor period, which very clearly set out—in Acts of Parliament—who was allowed to wear ermine, who was allowed to wear mink, who was allowed to wear lynx fur and all the rest of it, as fur was a huge status symbol and people in those times often flaunted their wealth by the wearing of furs. I think that people now have other ways of demonstrating that they are wealthy and have access to lots of consumer goods without having to put the skin and the fur of another animal on their backs.

We can point out to those countries that still condone and support fur farming that the economy of a country does not collapse when it is made illegal. When the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) introduced her private Member’s Bill, I am sure people said, “Oh, job losses and unemployment, everybody will get rickets and bubonic plague will break out and God knows what else, because nobody can afford any taxes for the health service!” But the sky did not fall down. People who had been involved in the UK fur trade went off and did something else, and the economy kept going.

I think that nationally—not in this debate, but nationally—we are inclined to do something in this House, we make something illegal, we assuage our conscience and we say, “Job done!” We are, of course, fur farmers by proxy, because other countries are farming fur, the demand for which in the UK is worth—I think my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) said this—£56.5 million in fur sales. So we clearly have to do more as parliamentarians and public policy makers to inform our fellow citizens that fur is something that they should not want, buy or look for.

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) when he talks about the absolute “duty of care” on retailers. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) mentioned internet sales, which I will not go into because everybody tries to grapple with them, and I have not found a solution for controlling such sales; frankly, we know it is a problem. However, at a time when the high street has never been more competitive—fighting over market share—it strikes me as unconscionable that high street retailers are flogging products to people that they believe are fake but are actually real, because those products can be sourced from overseas at very cheap prices. Those retailers should be called out and those customers should not be going through their doors, because the power of the credit card, the purse and the wallet speaks, and in a competitive, cut-throat retail sector I suggest that the customer is king.

[Sir Roger Gale]

First, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making the point that I had tried to make so much better than I made it myself. Secondly, when the House voted to ban fur farming in 2000, we did so because we believed that it was a vile practice and that it had no place in modern British society. We did not vote to move the problem from A to B. Therefore, when my hon. Friend the Minister responds to this debate, it is only logical that he says that having willed the ends we must now will the means, and ban the trade.

[Simon Hoare]

My hon. Friend is right and if legislation was before us that banned the import of foreign-farmed fur into our country, he would find me in the Aye Lobby voting for it. However, his argument also goes to the point that we slightly salved our domestic conscience when we said—it was before my time in the House—that we have banned fur farming here, but we have not spread the message as to why we banned it, and nor have we pointed out that the doom-mongers’ prediction of an economic collapse after a ban has not materialised. We have not been strong enough in taking that message to those countries where fur farming still continues.

To state the blindingly obvious, we are no longer an imperial power that can send a gunboat to countries that we do not like, so that we can bully people into obeying. However, we can take our soft power and our leadership, and use them. If we wanted to find an example of where we had done that, we and some allies did it on climate change. We realised that there was an issue that needed to be addressed, and through Kyoto and other initiatives we got the world thinking collectively about climate change and the imperative of dealing with it in a proper way to safeguard humanity.

Now, let us not ascribe the same scale to fur farming as to the future climate of our world, although for some it will be equally important, but we should be talking to those countries that still farm fur. Frankly, if our banning imports meant that somebody lost £56.5 million of sales, I suggest that they would just find that money elsewhere in the world market. They will not stop farming fur because we stop importing it. Banning fur imports will make us feel better; of course, it will. We can write to those constituents who have emailed us on this issue—I have had many emails from my constituents in North Dorset—