House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Simon Hoare and Roger Gale

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare]

I say to the hon. Gentleman, whom I nearly called my hon. Friend because he is a friend, that I am more than likely to vote for this Bill on Second Reading. I possibly should have told my Whip about that beforehand—there is my peerage gone. Notwithstanding the fact that my right hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden) is one of my oldest and dearest friends, I must say that his reasoned amendment seems to have been written more because of the need to write something, rather than actually to make a case to persuade, which is entirely atypical of the way he usually works.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge made the important point—I do hope that those on the Treasury Bench and the Government Whips have listened—that this is an opportunity to consider proper amendments to make this a more material exercise.

We live, thank God—I say this as a Roman Catholic—in a multicultural, multi-religious society. We have an established church, and I do not think anybody would advocate for its disestablishment at this stage. However, it is surely an anachronism, just because of the sees to which they have been appointed, for the Archbishop of Canterbury and others to sit as part of the legislature. The only other country that has clerics in such a position by dint of office is Iran, which I suggest is not a country that we should seek to emulate very much. Let us have a faith Bench or faith Benches, but let those Benches be of mixed faiths and truly representative of the faith groups doing so much good in our country.

A number of the hereditary peers have been doing sterling work. I think, in particular, of my noble Friend The Earl Howe and His Grace the Duke of Wellington, whom Labour Members were praying in aid just a few months ago, of course, when His Grace was leading the campaign against the then Government to improve water quality and sewerage. I suggest that his expertise in and knowledge of water quality in chalk streams and so forth should not be lost.

I do take on board the sincerity that the Minister claims—this is not a personal thing or a class war; it is a matter of principle. I think the House gets him on that. I do not think he needs to make that point any more. But I do hope that there may be an opportunity for a supernumerary list outside the normal leaders’ nominations —birthday or new year honours—so that those hereditaries who wish to continue their service, and not all will, can have conferred upon them a life peerage. That would make good much of what the Minister has said with regard to his principal motivation and that this is not a personal thing.

[Sir Roger Gale]

Will my hon. Friend agree that if this legislation is to go through, there should be a provision to ensure that all the hereditary peers are offered a life peerage as part of the package?

[Simon Hoare]

One can make a perfectly reasonable argument to say it should be offered to all. One can make an equally good argument that it should be offered only to hereditary peers who are fulfilling a House of Lords duty—chairing a Committee perhaps, or if they are active on their party’s Front Bench. My right hon. Friend has made an important point and I am sure that the Minister will consider it. It would certainly be an act of good grace and it would be an act of charm, both of which I know are characteristics with which the Minister is fully imbued.

[Sir Roger Gale]

I do not wish to detain the House, but when I raised this point during the Minister’s remarks he indicated that it would be perfectly proper and possible for a leader of a party to put forward hereditary peers for life peerages, but that is not the point. The point is that there should be a separate list in this legislation to accommodate all of them.

[Simon Hoare]

I am going to stay mute on the “all” point, but my right hon. Friend echoes the point I was endeavouring to make, which is that a list of conversion, as it were, from hereditary to life should be considered by His Majesty’s Government, outwith leaving it to leaders of any party to nominate for a new year’s honour or a birthday honour, because that would clog up the system for those who are new to public life—echoing the point the Minister raised—where people want to make a contribution and may have caught the eye of the powers that be in order to secure a nomination.

I think there is a job of work that needs to be done. There are a number of ways in which one can land on the right solution, but it should not just be a case of, “Thank you so very much indeed for your service. Please return the ermine to the Lord Great Chamberlain. Your retirement party has been postponed because we could not find a room to have it in”, or whatever it may happen to be. I think there is a way which is elegant, which is kind, which is graceful and which has some democratic underpinning, because at least it will have gone through the appointments.

I close by saying that this is a missed opportunity, and the Labour Front Bench needs to consider that. I appreciate that they have the distorting effect of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who did take up a little Labour bandwidth. We all got constrained by delivering Brexit, or trying not to deliver Brexit. And then we all had the big national distortion of the pandemic. But to offer this dance of the seven veils, after 14 years of opposition, and on an issue that people in this place and outside have been talking about for over a century, suggests to me a lack of detailed preparedness by the Government in some policy areas. It cannot have been a shock to Labour that they won the election; it may have come as a pleasant surprise that they won so comprehensively, but it really cannot have come as a shock that they were likely to win the general election whenever it came, irrespective of how hard my colleagues and I were working to ensure that did not happen:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune”,

or misfortune in my party’s case, but we are where we are.

I hope that amendments are forthcoming—I do not think it is too late to work cross-party on this—to buttress this proposal and deliver some of that democratisation of the House of Lords, and to make sure it is more regionally reflective. I listened to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) talking about the number of white men. I will be careful as he is helping me on a constituency issue, for which I am grateful and I want to put my thanks on the record, but my party has given the country three female Prime Ministers, the first Prime Minister of Jewish heritage and the first Prime Minister of the Hindu faith, so I am not entirely certain that we need to take lessons from the Labour party on how to bring people who are not necessarily used to public life into public life.

Rating (Property in Common Occupation) and Council Tax (Empty Dwellings) Bill

Debate between Simon Hoare and Roger Gale

Tuesday 16th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare]

Mr Deputy Speaker, you are robust.

[Sir Roger Gale]

I am enjoying it.

Fur Trade

Debate between Simon Hoare and Roger Gale

Monday 4th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[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—