Animal Slaughter (Religious Methods)

Shabana Mahmood Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing the debate and the hon. Members who took part in the production of this report. I follow on from my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) and the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) in welcoming not only the atmosphere of calm in this debate and the transparent way in which it has been conducted so far, but the overall tone of the report produced by the APPG. It feels better to have this type of debate, rather than the one we had earlier in the year, followed by extensive media reporting, which was deeply divisive and caused a great deal of upset and pain to religious communities, who felt that their religious freedoms were under attack in an atmosphere of misinformation and sensationalist media reporting, which we should all do our best to avoid.

I am a practising Muslim, so the issues relating to access to religious slaughter matter to me personally; they also matter to many thousands of my constituents who are also Muslim. I represent a constituency with a large Muslim population, but I also represent other communities who have spoken to me about issues relating to religious slaughter—in particular, the Sikh community in my constituency, who worry that they are inadvertently consuming meat that, according to their religious laws, they would not be allowed to consume. That is why I will focus most of my remarks on the key issue of labelling, which is very important in order to give religious communities—people of practising religious faith—the opportunity to access meat that is in accordance with religious belief, and for those who wish to reject that meat, either on grounds of views on the humaneness of the method of slaughter or because of other religious views. They should also be protected.

I just say that I absolutely fully support this country’s current legislative framework, which allows religious communities to have access to meat that has not been stunned prior to slaughter. I think it is an important protection for religious freedom in our legislative framework and it should be retained. If it was not, as the hon. Member for Huntingdon said, religious communities would be forced to import meat or consider their long-term future in this country, and that would be a big and important moment for religious minority communities in our country.

The report says a great deal about labelling, much of which I support. As a person of practising religious faith, it is important to me that when I am buying meat, I am able to know whether that meat is halal and whether it has been stunned prior to slaughter. I was a bit troubled by some evidence given to the APPG by the Halal Food Authority in particular, which was uneasy about labelling, because it felt that if people knew that the meat had been stunned prior to slaughter, it would lead to a rejection of halal meat that had been stunned. I think that is a misunderstanding both of what is happening in our communities today and of the essential rights of consumers to know what they are buying. We should not be trying to hoodwink communities into accepting practices that result from mass production and mechanised processes, when, if people knew about those, they would utterly reject and feel very strongly about them.

I agree with the point made by Shechita UK and the Association of Non-Stun Abattoirs about the extent of labelling. Let us say the starting position is the belief that consumers should know what has happened to meat—whether it has been slaughtered in accordance with religious principles and about the method of stunning. None of those is a particularly pleasant way to treat animals. Sometimes I think we feel that we can sanitise the whole process of eating meat. At the end of the day, an animal is being killed, and, for people of religious faith, the killing of an animal is a really big deal, which is why so many Muslims and Jews, in particular, are so wedded to the methods laid down in their holy books for the killing of an animal. A life is being taken and therefore, it can only be done in the precise way that God has ordained, according to God’s law, and that is why that matters so very much. When there is mass production and so much meat being produced in a mechanised way, it is difficult to stick to the principles laid down in the holy books, and some kind of further understanding of what happens in those processes is really important. However, we cannot take away from the fundamental act that is being done, and it is important that consumers understand that more. It is not just a nicely packaged pink bit of meat that we buy in the supermarket; something happened to it before, and the more information that we can give people, the more we can shine a light on practices in the industry, and actually, sometimes shining a light puts pressure on industry to look at better methods that would be more acceptable to the public.

Labelling is something that we should all support, but we should not just go for the basic level, and we should not just say that the burden on industry would be too great if we gave more information. That sounds to me almost as though we are trying to hide from the public what really happens in some abattoirs. We should be totally open and transparent, and labelling should not just extend to whether the animal is stunned or non-stunned; we should look at the method of stunning as well as the method of slaughter, and we should seek to educate the public as much as possible. That would matter a lot not only to people of religious faith, but to people who have no religious faith but want to know how an animal has been treated, and ultimately, how it died.