Ivory Bill — House of Commons, 2018-06-04
Topic: Mixed Topics
John Mann (Labour, Centre-left): Let me add my congratulations, too. As I told a group of constituents in this very Chamber this morning, my role as a Back-Bench MP is to highlight the idiocy of the Front-Bench spokesperson who should be immediately sacked for failing to listen to the wisdom that I offer, or immediately promoted to greater things for their infinite wisdom. I offer the Secretary of State the opportunity not to have his career spiked by suggesting that he listens to me on this question of museums and artefacts I offer the Labour Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), my willingness to sit on the Bill Committee in order to ensure that the detail of the Bill is sufficiently clear to meet the purposes and the wishes of the House. I am sure that the shadow Front-Bench team will be delighted to have me in some Committee Room for a period of time on such important matters. None the less, I volunteer to do it, and I look forward to receiving the call As well as congratulating the Secretary of State on bringing forward, very appropriately, this piece of legislation, I also must congratulate two women Members of Parliament who have campaigned on this matter very assiduously over very, very many years. I am now desperately trying to remember their exact constituencies. I am talking about my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham). They have both worked assiduously, and both have challenged their own parties to ensure that progress is made on this matter. That is not always the easiest thing to do. I pay tribute to them. Their role has been important Of course, one can have quibbles, and that is what Bill Committees are for—or Committees of the whole House if one does not have the opportunity to serve one’s country in that way—in order to strengthen and improve any Bill. There are some small issues to deal with. However, with due respect, I shall not give my own Front-Bench team such an easy time by merely referring to our party leader when it comes to discussions on our policy. We are a very democratic and open party and autonomy is given to the Front Bench. Therefore, in the Bill Committee, I am anticipating that my party will look at the question—let us call it the Elgin question—of what happens to artefacts. I am not just referring to the Scottish Government; there are local authorities across the country that could be doing things as well. I am not saying this to add humour to the debate. The situation with the elephant species and our responsibility to the planet has reached a critical point. That has been cited by all the experts, and, of course, the most famous of all of those in this country is David Attenborough. I seem to recall him saying that we are at the last 1% of time in terms of the population of these great species Frankly, if we cannot deliver on this, we do not deserve to be parliamentarians. We have a moment and a chance to do something, and we must take that chance not just with a piece of legislation, but with what goes beyond it. This matter needs to be addressed, along with two others. The first of those others is cyber-crime. The Government are currently investing lots of resource in cyber-crime—and correctly so. Cyber-crime involving the trade in endangered species, not least in ivory, is phenomenal. I pay tribute to the work that eBay has done to ban ivory from its sales. There are also many other ways in which the internet is being used for trade. I think that we could be wiser and sharper. At the conference in October, trade must be a vital part of the agenda, because, by definition, international co-operation can be the only effective way of dealing with such cyber-crime. We can lead the way as well by tweaking our legislation and by improving our resource The other matter that I wish to address is in relation to our international development work. The Batwe, the forest dwellers, are, without question, the poorest people on the planet, and yet, as the custodians of the forest for millennia, they are a perfect group of people for protecting the forest elephants in particular. The small numbers of the Batwe who remain are vastly unemployed and live in the most pitiful of conditions on the edge of the forest in places such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Uganda. There is an opportunity to do something that would be both humanitarian and effective. With the Bishop of Durham and other parliamentarians, I have had the honour and privilege of visiting the forest with an income and making a critical contribution to protecting such people and to renewing their traditional way of life. The two things come together very smartly, but straightforwardly. There is also an opportunity to experiment modestly, but urgently, to see whether that works. It would be significant if there were a country willing to accept our assistance My next point has been mentioned by the Secretary of State: the use of the British Army in ranger training. I have actually just approached the Royal College of Defence Studies and suggested co-operating on writing a paper on this. Such training has been done successfully in Malawi and in Gabon, but we also have a vested interest. We could give the Parachute Regiment, for instance, a training opportunity in an area of danger. For example, they could use drone technology in training rangers—whether military, civilian or a combination—in countries that want to do that. That is a huge training opportunity in these less conflictual times It is far better to carry out such training in large countries such as Tanzania, Botswana or Zambia, or wherever there is a country that wishes to receive such training. We win in a very significant way by training our military. Where else? We do drone training on Ascension Island because we cannot find anywhere big enough in this country to do it. Yet, that technology would clearly be transformational if it were given to rangers who were trained to use it I had the privilege of opening and assisting at the US embassy’s annual technology challenge, which addresses the issue of dealing with wildlife crime through technology. The event takes place annually in London, and allows entrepreneurs from the IT sector here to develop products to assist in countering wildlife crime using the most advanced technology. It is a brilliant initiative by the Americans. There is a combination of factors, and we can use our skills there. We can facilitate the development of those skills in countries that want them and that can quite clearly see the economic benefit of doing so in terms of direct jobs and the tourism potential. Far more importantly, this is about national identity and national pride. This is about indigenous species in countries in both Asia and Africa that are in danger of being wiped out, so it seems that these measures would be an easy win We could put in considerable resource compared with what was there before—in fact it would actually be minuscule in terms of what we are doing anyway, because we already have to train our own people. We have that training ability and we have the ability to pass it on. And I would go further. Some of the best ranger trainers and counter-poacher rangers in Africa are ex-British military and this would be a great opportunity for those who have served our country to develop skills, particularly if they pass them on I recommend those policies to Labour Front Benchers as well. With that, let me recongratulate the Government on their brilliance and look forward to assisting them in realising their goal.