Quick – what’s the difference between parliament and government?
If, like me, this question makes you mimic a quizzical puppy – imagine sitting in one of the beautiful meeting rooms in the Scottish Parliament while this is Q.1 in our pop quiz introduction to the Academic Engagement with Parliament workshop.
Thankfully none of the other scientists were leaping up in their chairs to answer either!
Yesterday I had the very good fortune to attend a brilliant workshop run by SPICe (a part of Scottish Parliament responsible for research briefings and information). The aim of the workshop was to get academics engaging more with the parliament and the policy making process.
The answer, by the way, is that the government runs the country and the parliament serves the country by holding the government to account. It’s a remarkably simple answer that I hope was buried somewhere in the back of my brain but just an example of one of the ways I realised how poor I am at policy-engagement!
One of my big take home messages from yesterday was that Parliament does desperately want to engage with us, but we academics tend to wait in our ivory tower for somebody to come calling at its base. I often accuse the public of not seeking out scientific information when they have a question so imagine my shame (In Glaswegian parlance: it gie me a right riddie) when I realised I’m just as guilty of this when it comes to engaging with policy.
Transparency is important for the Scottish Parliament and their Bills are all available at each stage, with many calls for feedback throughout the process. The government also declares its plan for the year and any bills it will propose at regular intervals (usually September). Why do I never check this to see if there’s anything our team should be feeding into?
And it’s impossible to visit the Scottish Parliament without talking about how beautiful it is. It’s a truly amazing building, designed to reinforce the ideals of transparency and accountability for the people.
Whether quirk of architectural psychology or just the joy of having actually learned something, I came away from yesterday feeling inspired and enthusiastic about policy in a way I haven’t felt since my PhD days.
If you ever get a chance to attend one of SPICes workshops (or equivalent in your country) I would recommend it completely. (And I didn’t think the coffee was that bad . . . )
Today, the UK’s House of Commons was supposed to vote on relaxing the fox hunting with hounds ban in England and Wales. But they’re not going to. If you’re not a citizen of the United Kingdom (and even if you are) you might be very confused by the situation.
Before we go further, I think I have to say something about my own voting here. I don’t make a secret of my political affiliation and you could find out without much difficulty, but in my role as communicator/educator on this blog, I want to present you with the science and let you make up your own opinion. Although I’m open to hearing if you think I should make my affiliations public in relation to this post.
The right wing conservative government therefore only has one supporter in Scotland, an MP from the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. In Scotland there is also a Labour MP who opposes the majority conservative UK government but still supports the union. And there is also one Liberal Democrat MP who outright lied about the SNP party’s leader and who is currently being sued by his constituents.
This means that 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in Westminster are held by a party who want independence from the rest of the UK and who are there to increase devolved powers (the SNP believes that independence can only come from a mandate set by Scotland’s devolved parliament, not from Westminster – the impetus for independence must come from the Scottish voters.). But what does any of this have to do with animal welfare? For this I should direct you towards another YouTube video:
For some reason, possibly because we still live in what is technically a theocracy, class matters in the United Kingdom’s politics. The conservatives are the party for the upper class, and the upper class like to go fox hunting. So despite the fact that fox hunting with hounds (note this terminology, because you won’t hear it in much of the media) has been banned in England and Wales by the Hunting Act in 2004. In Scotland, similar legislation had been in place since 2002. The Conservatives wanted to relax this ban to allow foxes to be pursued by a pack of hounds, in essence to allow fox hunting as we think of it to happen again.
Although foxes in Scotland were never at risk (although our legislation is not without criticism), the SNP finally decided they would vote on this matter, and their vote would not be in favour of relaxing the ban. So we have a party which wants independence voting on an issue which does not affect their constituents (although their constituents have very strong feelings about the issue, because foxes are cute, presumably, or more cynically: because the average Scottish voter has no love of the aristocracy and hunting). And Nicola Sturgeon, the party’s leader, said the choice to vote on this issue was made, in part, to jerk the leash of the Conservative government and remind them how much power the SNP has.
Here’s the thing – it’s taken 600 words to summarise the political situation around this lack of a vote, but this is no victory for animal welfare. Nowhere in those 600 words do we consider the scientific evidence behind fox hunting. So here it is:
Hunting with hounds does not control fox populations (Rushton et al, 2006). In fact, fox numbers may increase (Lozano et al, 2013). Managing foxes as an agricultural pest needs to be done in a sustainable, long-term model covering large areas (McLeod et al, 2010). To top it off, farmers aren’t really convinced that foxes are an agricultural pest (Baker and Mcdonald, 2001) and only tolerate hunting-with-hounds that happens on their land. Pursuit hunting is not humane, and the method of death that hounds enact on hunting is not humane either. The ban is resisted because it is spoiling peoples’ fun (Marvin, 2007). Even though drag hunting is still supported and allowed, but somehow is less fun than smearing blood on one another.
We have no scientific evidence supporting fox hunting with hounds other than the fact that a very small, but very rich segment of the population want to do it occasionally and they’re slightly put out when they don’t get a chance. It’s not an effective pest control method and it’s not a humane death. Of all the issues to draw a line in the sand on, we’ve chosen one where a utilitarian would come to a clear conclusion after reviewing the scientific evidence. We’ve chosen an issue where it’s more important to posture about on what side of Hadrian’s Wall we come down on, than to review the scientific evidence.