Ivory Bill

Viscount Hailsham Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 24th October 2018 Lords Chamber

In this context, the definition of “high” depends on the value of the item in question, regardless of the personal circumstances of its owner at the time. As I have said, we are not talking about very expensive things. Secondly, in addition to the fee there is the cost of completing the form, which may involve someone else doing it, thereby incurring an additional charge. How might this work? Somebody gave me this example. If you live in London and your surviving parent, at the other end of England, dies, you may take from their house the odd piece of furniture or whatnot. Most people, however, live in quite small houses and would ask the local auctioneer to clear out their parent’s house. The auctioneer would no doubt do it but would say, “We cannot sell anything that has a bit of ivory in it unless we register it, and we will charge you for that”. By the time you have concluded that you will not get much for the contents, and that you will have to pay the auctioneer’s commission, the registration fee and the cost of the person carrying it out for you a couple of hundred miles away, you will ask yourself whether much is left over. Given that things do not always sell at auction, before you know it this whole process will cost more than the value of the item in question. That is a pretty strange state of affairs.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

If that happens, there is a real risk that the artefact in question will be destroyed.

[Lord Inglewood]

It is as the noble Viscount rightly says. But some will then say, as mentioned in Committee, that it is not necessary: “Selling it doesn’t matter—give it away to a charity shop”. What is a charity shop to do with it? It will want to sell it to somebody else, so it will be caught by the requirements for prior legislation. The only way that I can see this chain of argument evolving is that we may end up with refugees from other parts of the world surrounded by battered Georgian furniture, which seems a pretty surreal destination.

As the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, said, the likely result of all this is that a significant quantity of all the items—which, let us not forget, have real cultural and historical significance for this country—will end up on the tip. In addition, let us not forget that going to the tip along with the ivory will be a lot of tropical hardwoods such as mahogany, rosewood and so on. For a country that cares about these things and tells the world how much they matter, as we do, to legislate and consign them to the tip in Britain seems ludicrous, and a sad end to the ivory and mahogany involved. If I might misquote John Betjeman:

“Goodbye to old things. We who loved you are sorry

They’ve carted you off by refuseman’s lorry”.

By no stretch of the imagination could these things harm anyone or anything. In a free country one should, as a matter of principle, be able to sell freely items of that character. You should not need a state commissar’s authorisation to do so. From what I have heard, the Government’s case for this registration is illogical, not based on the evidence, completely disproportionate, philistine and a gratuitously destructive proposal. As a consequence, I am strongly opposed to it.

--- Later in debate ---

I have made inquiries of the government machine to see whether the measured representations already made by some noble Lords in Committee might have produced some amelioration in the technical provisions of this Bill on Report. However, I was not encouraged, hence my support today for Amendments 23, 24, 32 and 36 in this group and Amendments 3 and 4 in the next group. They would all to some extent mitigate the adverse effects to which I have referred. They would represent a welcome move towards common sense, which I always like to apply to legislation that comes before this House. I urge the Minister to accept them.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my noble friend Lord Cormack’s Amendment 2, but what I have to say is in support of all the amendments in this group, including that tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, on Northumbrian pipes. Sharp-eyed noble Lords will have noticed that I put my name to a number of these amendments and then withdrew it. That was not because of lack of support but because I thought I was not going to be here performing professional duties, and I thought it discourteous to your Lordships’ House to sign amendments and not be here. That depends on noble Lords’ point of view.

I think everyone who has spoken in this debate and all the other debates about the Ivory Bill endorses the principle of trying to prevent elephant poaching—it is a dreadful thing—and thinks that we need to do all we can to stop it. As a matter of fact, robust action against poaching is probably the most effective way, but an effective, proportionate and reasonable way of disrupting the trade is also appropriate. That is the purpose of this Bill, but we have to apply the test of proportionality to identify whether the actions contemplated by the Bill are proportionate in their consequences both ways. There are two very serious disadvantages associated with what this Bill is about—I shall come to the amendment specifically.

The first, which my noble friend Lord Cormack dealt with quite correctly and at some length, is the interference with private property. This Bill is flagrant interference with private property, and my noble friend Lord Inglewood takes the same view. At the same time, there will inevitably be a consequential loss and destruction of the artefacts. The description of trying to sell a low-cost bit of brown furniture—although of quite interesting historical value—and it proving impossible will inevitably lead to the skip.

There is therefore a cost in all of this: a cost to principle and a cost to artefacts. That takes me on to the question: what will this Bill achieve in stopping the elephant poaching or trade? I share the view of my noble friend Lord De Mauley: I suspect very little. What this is actually about is sending a message, but messages go unheeded and unheard, and I am sure that this one will. It is about making gestures, but often these gestures should not be made. I remember the Dangerous Dogs Bill. I remember unit fines in the magistrates’ court. These were gestures that should never have been made and messages that should never have been sent.

Against that background, I turn to the way of addressing what has been identified. This Bill is going to pass, and I agree with my noble friend the Duke of Wellington that it should pass. However, there are defects within it, and the defects are being addressed by looking at the exemptions. This House should be trying to enlarge the exemptions and seeking to put in further provisos. It is in that spirit that I propose to support probably all the amendments in respect of which your Lordships’ opinion is sought, and I hope there will be quite a few Divisions. I think, too, however—and this will be to the great relief of your Lordships’ House—that the views I have expressed, which are general to the amendments in this group, actually apply to all the other amendments and will not require any repetition from me.

[Lord Carrington of Fulham]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 25, which is a very specific amendment and rather esoteric, but I will come on to that in a moment because I really just wanted to register my agreement with the previous speakers that this Bill is far too restrictive. We are banning ivory items and ivory inlays and items containing ivory that have no possibility of being recarved in the Far East for sale on to that market and no prospect of having any value in themselves. An ivory carver sitting in Vietnam, for instance, would have no interest in carving a sliver of ivory to go into a false 18th century box. It would just make no sense at all and it would be nonsense. We ought to have a sense of proportion about what we are trying to do in this Bill.

What we are trying to do is to stop large lumps of ivory being exported to countries where they will be recarved and converted into the items that their populations think are attractive and for which they will pay good money. This is not an emotional business; it is purely a financial business. If we ban the export of large items of ivory, or their sale in this country—because they will be smuggled out of this country eventually, just as rhino horns are smuggled out of here, which is a similar problem—we will achieve what we can achieve in respect of saving the African elephant using the antique ivory trade.

As has been said, the protection of the African elephant is not down to what is sold at Christie’s in King Street in London. It is down to whether we can finance the actions against the poachers, whether we can train the police and protection officers in those countries, whether we can arm them properly, and whether we can ensure that the supply routes where the ivory is taken out of the country are shut down. That is what it is really all about. It is not about this gesture politics Bill. That is what it is about, and that is what we should be concentrating on.

I add something that has not been mentioned because it is not politically correct to do so. A lot of ivory is not obtained by rogue poachers; it is done with the connivance of people who are very powerful in the countries where the elephants are, and they make a lot of money out of it.

My noble friend the Minister assures me that several of the countries which have large numbers of elephants are in favour of us banning the sale of ivory. I am perhaps too cynical. Perhaps I have lived too long a life dealing with rogues and rascals both in politics and in business, but if I were trying to make money out of selling ivory, I would try to shut down part of the market which I thought conceivably—however misguidedly—could be competition. In other words, I would of course say, “Ban the ivory market. Ban, ban, ban”, so that I can kill the elephants in the savannah and make money by selling those tusks to Hong Kong.

I should apologise, because perhaps I should have made that speech during Committee but, as some noble Lords will know, I was under the depredations of various surgeons then, so I apologise for not making it then.

My Amendment 25 is rather esoteric. It is even more esoteric than the Northumbrian pipes of the noble Baroness, Lady Quin. Under the Bill, an item which is detachable and can stand alone is an individual item and is therefore treated as such. This is not usually important, but it is very important if you are dealing with scientific instruments. The way that 18th-century or early 19th-century mercury barometers are regulated is by a little knob that pulls out. It is detachable and independent of the barometer itself. You would use it to adjust the vernier on the scale to measure the height of the mercury and to put pressure on the mercury reservoir at the bottom of the barometer, when you regulated the barometer to show the correct barometric pressure, to make sure that the mercury was at the right level. So it has two functions.

My amendment is specifically designed to say that this knob should be treated as part of the barometer, not as a separate item, because these knobs were almost always an ivory disc—not dissimilar, I have to say, to the discs used in so many other things, such as portrait miniatures, tickets for theatres, and so on, which have no commercial value for recarving. They have commercial value because there are artistic elements to them, but the knob has no commercial value. If I tell your Lordships that they are 2.54 centimetres in diameter, those of you with a scientific bent will know that that is an inch. They are of a maximum of an inch in diameter, very thin and on a metal shank. All I am trying to do by the amendment is to ensure that antique dealers do not have to throw away the integral knob when they sell the barometer.