It is a real pleasure to be able to speak so soon in this debate—I am not sure we thought we would get here so quickly, but I am pleased that we have. The Labour party is strongly committed to a ban on hunting trophy imports, reflected by the number of colleagues here on a Friday—and on all sides of the House, in fact. It was a manifesto commitment of ours in the last election and I am delighted to say that we shall support the Bill today.
I pay tribute to the late Labour MP for Waveney, Bob Blizzard, who was one of the founders of the campaign to ban trophy hunting. This Bill is part of his legacy. I thank his partner Jane Evans and his friend Eduardo Gonçalves, who have worked tirelessly on the campaign and have been a particular help to me. I also echo Members across the House in their tribute to Sir David Amess and his work on this matter.
Like the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) and people across the country, I was shocked and horrified at the killing of Cecil the lion by an American trophy hunter in 2015 and at the needlessly cruel manner in which Cecil died. He had been left to drown in his own lung blood, simply because the hunter wanted to win a special prize for shooting a lion with a bow and arrow. However, I was even more shocked and horrified to learn that, since 2015, British trophy hunters have brought more than 100 trophies of lions from Africa into the UK. Indeed, what British hunters are doing is arguably worse than what Cecil suffered, because he lived in the wild in Zimbabwe and was 13 when he was killed; some British trophy hunters, on the other hand, fly to Africa where they shoot tame lions that have been hand-reared since they were born merely to become a hunter’s trophy.
It turns out that lions are not the only African animals British hunters are shooting: they are shooting as trophies many other threatened species in Africa and around the world, and all this has happened since 2015, the year when the world supposedly woke up to the horror of trophy hunting—the year when we all thought the killing of Cecil would bring us to our senses and put an end to this horror story once and for all.
How wrong we were. We consider ourselves a nation of animal lovers, and rightly so. However, the things British trophy hunters do should shame us all. Here are the prizes that just one British trophy hunter has won from Safari Club International: the hunting achievement diamond award, for shooting animals from 125 different species; the animals of Africa gold award, for shooting at least 61 different African animals; and the global hunting gold award, for shooting 50 different animals on five different continents. The British hunter in question has gone on to win over 30 more of these awards.
Safari Club International, which handed out those prizes, has a branch in Britain. It has been actively working to undermine and block the Bill that we are considering today. It has spent over £1 million on a disinformation campaign—other Members have mentioned that. Investigations by the Washington Post revealed it to be the work of an ally of Donald Trump who was revealed to have set up a number of fake news groups to promote extreme right-wing causes and who tried to create an astroturf campaign.
Africans are as shocked and horrified at trophy hunting as we are. They are vehemently opposed to people jetting in from around the world to wipe out their wildlife and natural heritage for so-called “sport”. A very recent poll in South Africa, the hub of the African trophy hunting industry, showed that, even there, fully 68% of people are against trophy hunting.
Many of us recently received a letter from the former President of Botswana, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, who banned all trophy hunting in his country. He told us how banning trophy hunting not only benefited threatened species such as elephants—Botswana is now home to one third of all of Africa’s elephants—but brought prosperity to local communities, created more jobs and opportunities for local people and improved living conditions through investment in photo-safaris instead.
The example of Kenya, which banned trophy hunting in the 1970s, should be applauded and encouraged. While lion, elephant and rhino populations are falling throughout much of Africa, their numbers are all increasing in Kenya. It is of economic benefit to the people as well. Just compare the conditions of the Kenyan Maasai with those of neighbouring Tanzania, where trophy hunting is still legal; 20,000 Tanzanian Maasai are homeless due to land clearance.
It is time to act. We can say that it is wrong for British people to kill animals for pleasure and mementoes. We can set an example. Writer and poet Benjamin Zephaniah perhaps put it best when he said:
“We human beings have a responsibility to look after this planet and its animals. We need to put trophy hunting in the dustbin of history, alongside the slave trade, female infanticide, and witch-hunting.”