My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, asks what the purpose of the Bill is. We all know what the purpose of the Bill is: it is to advance the agenda of people who believe in the existence of animal rights and to embed them at the heart of government, bossing everybody about. It is a bad Bill, not simply for that reason, but more importantly, as I will explore in a moment, because it changes the moral basis on which we have habitually treated animals well in this country. I will come back to that in a moment, because I am going to leave to others—some who have already spoken—comments on the practical difficulties of putting this Bill into effect and the problems it is likely to give rise to. I always thought that it was the responsibility of this Parliament to hold Ministers to account, but we are now to have a committee roaming around Whitehall doing the job for us, it seems.
The clause that strikes me as most extravagant, however, is the one that gives the Secretary of State the unfettered power to declare, should he wish, that an earthworm is a sentient being. This is a power greater than that given by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden, which, as I recall, was restricted to the power to naming animals. Here, we are giving the Secretary of State the power to reclassify them almost without check.
I come back to my point about the moral basis on which we treat animals well. I have always loved this quotation from Lord Keynes:
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
Of course, I do not mean to refer in any sense to my noble friend on the Front Bench in that regard, but the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, put his finger on who the academic scribbler is. I well remember, in my first year as an undergraduate, walking past Blackwell’s and seeing prominently displayed in the front window a copy of Professor Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. He had, in 1975, as a young man, undergone a sort of convulsive conversion to vegetarianism, and this was his attempt to work out some rationale for what he was doing.
There were three points, essentially. First, people are not better or superior to animals. Secondly, what we have in common is that we sit on a spectrum of sentience. This puts us on the same level as the animals. The third point, as indicated by my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs, was a sort of crude utilitarianism which makes no distinction between humans and animals. Now, 45 years on, this book has spread throughout the world and become a text for all those who wish to promote the rights of animals. The logical consequence is that we are driven in the direction of veganism and the consumption solely of non-sentient plants.
I could not have asked for a more convenient introduction, in that sense, to what I was about to say, than the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, who, with consummate commercial skill, pointed us entirely in the direction of that veganism—and not only veganism but behaviour which respects and prevents harm to any sentient creature. That goes well beyond what we eat, as other noble Lords have said.
That is all okay: if Members of the House of Lords want to drive the country, without asking, in the direction of veganism, which we are told is hugely popular, although I do not know where the evidence for that comes from, on such a basis, and on the basis of some movie I have not yet seen about an improbable friendship between a scientist and an octopus—I am sure it is a tearjerker—that is absolutely fine. The House of Lords is free to do that, but what worries me is that we have, sited here in the House, a whole swathe of humanitarian legislation going back 200 years, protecting animals. Contrary to what Singer and those people would say about the abolition of the distinction between humans and animals, all that legislation has been based on our moral obligations as human beings, rational and endowed with conscience. It is why it is called humanitarian legislation. It is not based on some assumed rights of animals.
All that—not the legislation but the moral basis for the legislation—is now to be swept away by a Government embedding at the heart of our legislation the notion of sentience as the driver of how we should treat animals. The whole moral basis is being changed and replaced by this calculus of sentience. This is a very bad step. It reduces our obligations as people to something that will be the subject of endless judicial review and footling arguments about rules and laws, whether ganglions are the same as brains, and whatever else might come up in the course of these discussions.
I am really very concerned about the Bill. It does nothing at all good for animals, but it does a great disservice to the moral foundation of our society.