Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
NOT content with stopping free-born Englishmen from hunting, shooting and fishing, backbench MPs are turning their attentions to banning beastly foreigners from doing anything nasty to animals.
Lindsay Hoyle, Labour MP for Charley, has demanded that his government use its political might to stop Cypriots gorging themselves on thrushes, a delicacy on the menus of the island's restaurants. There are many injustices in the world which make one hanker for the days when a British gunboat was always on hand to take a few potshots at misbehaving foreigners, but this is perhaps not one of them.
Hoyle is even claiming British ownership of the threatened creatures. This House notes with concern the number of British songbirds being killed in Cyprus after migrating for the winter months,' he begins his thundering earlyday motion. On what basis can he justify this avian imperialism? Surely, the wretched things could equally be described as Cypriot songbirds which migrate to Britain for the summer months. Somehow, I suspect Mr Hoyle would not be too impressed if a Namibian police officer turned up on his doorstep trying to charge him with killing a swallow which had flown all the way from southern Africa only to gobble a slug pellet in Mr Hoyle's garden and drop dead.
Hoyle's colleague Edward O'Hara has also thrown his weight into the plight of faraway beasts. He has latched on to the fact that horses are being imported from Eastern Europe to land on Western European dinner plates. While stopping short of the usual moan about how despicable it is for foreigners to eat gee-gees, he wants the Eli Exports Directive to be amended to discourage the live transportation of horses across Europe. His eventual aim is for a 'carcass-only' trade in the animals. Just the one problem: when Jumping Jack Flash turns up by lorry for the 3:20 at Market Rasen, how is he supposed to compete if he has been strung up in the refrigeration unit?
Ross Clark
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