Ivory Bill — House of Lords, 2018-09-10
Topic: Mixed Topics
Patrick Cormack (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, this amendment and Amendment 18, which are grouped together with a number of other amendments, are succinctly explained thanks to the new custom in your Lordships’ House of being able to add a sentence of explanation. As the one for Amendments 17 says: "Not all miniatures would be covered by this limit. This amendment would allow more flexibility in judging miniatures" There is clearly going to be a considerable amount of bureaucracy following the enactment of the Bill. Anything that can be done to reduce that must be good for everyone, and good for the public purse. If we are going to have experts—and it will only be experts—looking at miniatures, and they have to worry because a miniature is 325 square centimetres rather than 320, that really is preposterous. Therefore, I suggest that this is a constructive, simple and sensible amendment. Similarly with Amendment 18, we have this arbitrary figure of 10% in the Bill. Brief reference has already been made in your Lordships’ House today to a recent case that came about as a result of a presidential edict in another country. I refer to a wonderful piece of 18th century Chippendale furniture from which, because it fell foul of the United States’ regulations, the owner felt obliged, in submitting it for auction to one of the major London auction houses—I think it was Christie’s—to remove the ivory escutcheons and substitute celluloid. It was the desecration of one of the finest pieces of English furniture of the 18th century. What an act of vandalism—an act committed because of the perception of regulations in another country. The consequence was that the piece failed to sell, although when it was sold some years before it was recorded as the most expensive piece of English 18th century furniture ever sold Reference has been made in our debates to some of the wonderful inlaid boxes from India. Many of them came from Goa, the Portuguese enclave. They are inlaid with ivory, and some are incredibly intricate and beautiful. But how do you really determine whether the volume of ivory is 10% or not? My noble friend Lord De Mauley has tabled a more sensible amendment than mine, given that he wants to make the figure 50%. I feel slightly ashamed of my own modesty in putting down only 20%, and applaud his adventurism in putting down 50%. However, we are dealing with a Government who seem hardly sympathetic to aesthetic considerations, who seem to be in the process of branding themselves as desecrators and champions of vandalism The figure of 20% is indeed very modest. Are we really going to endanger some fine artefacts from another age, albeit not necessarily of museum quality, because they have ivory from an elephant long, long dead? Here is a case, if ever there was one, of the best being the enemy of the good. Just imagine if we said that in our churches only monuments by Rysbrack and Nollekens would be allowed to remain from the 18th century and the others would have to go. That would be absurd. Why, therefore, do we have to say that something which may not be superlative but is still incredibly good, still part of our history, should be endangered by this arbitrary limit I hope that some sympathetic consideration will be given to these two points as well as to the others covered in the amendments which have been grouped with my two amendments. I like to think that we are a civilised country, and I feel that this is a civilised House. I do not want us to put on to the statute book something that, in fact, runs counter to civilisation. I beg to move.