Dame Angela Eagle

It is a great pleasure to serve, I think for the first time, under your chairmanship in Westminster Hall, Ms Jardine. We have had a consensus-driven debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones) for securing it. I note that she is extremely busy today because she also has a ten-minute rule Bill; since that deals with pets, we know that she has her speeches in the right order. She demonstrates through her work—we also heard it in her speech today—how much she cares for animals in whatever context, whether they are wild, domesticated or livestock. My hon. Friend represents a deep vein of concern that all of us have recognised that this country is well-known for: its concern for animals. We have a long and proud history of supporting animal welfare. The world’s first animal welfare law was passed here more than 200 years ago in 1822, so there is a long tradition that all of us draw on when thinking about these issues. The Government take that legacy seriously. Last December, we published our animal welfare strategy, which is the most ambitious programme in a generation. It is not just warm words; it is a real plan that is already in motion, with consultations launched on laying hens and lamb welfare. The UK has been at the forefront of animal welfare for generations. As many hon. Members have mentioned today—notably my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee) and for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner), who had both done a little work and discovered this—it was my sibling, my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle), who introduced the private Member’s Bill that led to the ban on fur farming in this country. Some of the speeches I heard this morning had a familiar ring to them from the epic battles that my sister had to try to get her private Member’s Bill on the statute book. It was talked out by Members of the then Conservative Opposition, and it was only after that failure that the then Labour Government decided that they would take forward the ban on fur farming, because it had been overwhelmingly demonstrated that that was what the public wanted. That win was not easily gained. People who are thinking about how to change the law and the moral attitude on these things need to understand that private Member’s Bills, not least the ones brought to the House by hon. Members who care about these things, often have a very important legacy. They can persuade Governments that they ought to get on and do what is sometimes controversial, but more often than not right. We were the first country to ban fur farming and we did that when a ban was not popular—those arguments had to be made from scratch. That meant other countries then recognised the reality of what was going on and moved to ban it too. We have to recognise, however, that the number of countries that have banned it is still quite small and it remains actively pursued in many other countries. I suspect that the way the ban was done left the loophole that many hon. Members have pointed out: while animals can no longer be farmed for their fur in the UK, the import and sale of fur and fur products from both farmed animals and those hunted or trapped in the wild remain legal. We heard today that 95% of fur comes from farmed animals. People need to bear that in mind—this is not particularly an issue of trapping wild animals. If we read our history, we know that, particularly on the North American continent, a lot of wild animals were hunted nearly to extinction in earlier times.