My Lords, I wish to refer briefly to Amendment 6, which is grouped with my noble friend Lord De Mauley’s leading amendments, as is my Amendment 5. I will not speak to that amendment; my noble friend Lord De Mauley has effectively covered it, because I also want to take out the word “outstandingly”.
My Amendment 6 would take out the words “an important” and put in “a significant”. That might sound of no significance, but it is. My noble friend Lord De Mauley talked about the sort of objects we will be dealing with here. One of the things that attracts me to social history is the things that people used and gave. I once knew a man—I have mentioned
him in your Lordships’ House in earlier debates—who had an amazing collection of theatre and race tickets. Many of them were in ivory. They could not be called outstanding and I do not think that any of them could be called important, but significant they most certainly were. This was a collection that reflected the social history of the mid-18th century: the people who patronised the playhouses or went to the racecourses and gained admission by presenting an ivory ticket or token. A large collection such as the one my friend had is of some value. Many of the examples were indeed individually unique; no other tickets to that particular theatre or performance was known to exist.
I referred to this earlier when I talked about the first amendment: he collected these things because of their intrinsic interest and his own fascination with social history, but also because of the knowledge that collectively, even though he probably had not given more than £10 or £20 for any individual item, the collection was worth something. He knew that if he fell on difficult times or wanted to help a son or daughter, there was a little nest egg that would probably produce a few thousand pounds. If we enact the Bill, we will deprive a collection and a collector like that. We are effectively confiscating private property. We are not physically destroying it, although, as my noble friend Lord De Mauley said a few minutes ago, that might well be the ultimate result, but we are saying to somebody that that property, legitimately and lovingly acquired, is no longer theirs to dispose of for any money at all. That is unjust and wrong. I return to the old, worn record: how does preventing the sale of such a collection, the items in which are all of some significance, help in any way to preserve an African or an Asian elephant in 2019 or 2020?
We are all concerned about the elephants—we keep coming back to that—but there is nothing incompatible between being desperately keen to save elephants and being desperately keen to save elements of our social history.