The first in our occasional series of guest pieces: this from a recent issue of the excellent vegetarian magazine VIVA! - www.viva.org.uk.

Unless you’re the head of a multinational corporation or you’re powerful enough to lunch with government ministers, Tony Wardle says you can...

Kiss democracy goodbye

There’s nothing quite so pithy as urinal philosophy. I remember one bit of scrawled wisdom in the men’s loo at a Brighton pub, circa 1980 - “If voting could change anything it would be illegal”.
At the time I dismissed it as anarchistic drivel but not any more.

Over the past couple of decades, democracy has been treated with such disdain by those who have risen to power on its back that if it were a computer hard drive you would wipe it clean and start afresh. There is so little to choose between the competing ‘philosophies’ that it makes almost no difference who gets your vote. And politicians themselves are now held in such contempt that fewer and fewer people bother to vote for any of them.

Even those policies that are introduced are ignored or side stepped when they become inconvenient. It appears that those who operate the levers of power increasingly do so only in response to powerful interest groups. Certainly they have done little to liberate ordinary humans such as you and I in recent years and even less to free animals from suffering. If Mahatma Gandhi was right and you can tell the moral progress of a nation by the way it treats its animals, we still have a long journey ahead of us.

With the current administration, we should have foreseen its priorities when Peter Mandelson took over the millennium dome and gave it the kiss of death. At about the same time, the longest court case in legal history - the McLibel trial - came to an end. McDonalds, the court found, were cruel to animals, their products could result in heart disease if eaten regularly, they were responsible for driving down the wages of already lowly paid workers and their marketing traded on the gullibility of children.

What was Mandelson’s response to this unsavoury record? He gave them pride of place inside the dome and his spokesperson said: “We need all the sponsors we can get!” In a nutshell, the promotion of big business in return for some of their dosh - and the right to belong to the world-controlling clubs they devised and run - is now what underlies all policy making.

Prisons, schools, the health service, state construction contracts, railways, buses - almost nothing can exist without private sector involvement. But worse than this, the closer the private sector gets to the centre of power, the greater the influence it exerts over policy making. No policy is now promoted unless it has the support of the private sector, that is the depth to which democracy has sunk. For animals that is a disaster - and it ain’t too good for humans, either.

Prior to taking office, the Labour party promised a royal commission into vivisection. Once it took power and started to rub shoulders with the City and its financial institutions, that promise melted away like summer snow. Instead, it bailed out that most cruel of all institutions, Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), rewarded its managing director with a title and the hand-wringing, reactionary Jack Straw paid a sycophantic visit to its torture chambers, uttering cloying words of support like a latter day Uriah Heap. More of this revolting spectacle later.

The Labour party also expressed its desire to see the end of live exports and implied that it would work for a ban. After six years of deliberations and urging people to be patient, telling them that demonstrations were futile and we should all work for a maximum transport time of eight hours, the new regulations have just been announced. Transport times have been increased to 90 hours, allowing animals to be carried from one side of the hugely-enlarged EU to the other. And the response from our elected representatives? About the same as if you’d called for volunteers for early euthanasia - total silence.

For window dressing, the 20 million animals who will suffer as a result of this betrayal are supposed to be rested for 12 hours after each nine hours on the road. As there is no one to enforce this requirement, life will continue exactly as before, with animal transporters ignoring the rest requirements entirely while queuing up to appear on any TV programme that will have them to boast of their part in procuring the best animal welfare regulations in the world.

There are few laws governing farmed animals, simply recommendations, so when Viva! goes inside factory farms and emerges with footage of obscenely cruel conditions, its easy for the government to ignore us. They simply lie and say that the farm meets all the necessary regulations. The statement is usually followed by a repeat of the claim “The best animal welfare...” etc, etc. And this is why we tend to ignore government and go directly to the public.

We have now registered dozens of complaints over conditions which breach just about every possible guideline and the only action that we are aware of is one for ‘excessive dust’. Inside that same farm we found animals kept permanently in almost total darkness, dead bodies littered around and rotting away, injured animals, others showing signs of mental breakdown, overcrowding and filth and squalor everywhere. And the farmer had his wrist slapped for creating excessive dust!

Elliott Morley, the man who has recently vacated the laughable title of Minister for Farmed Animal Welfare, should have been reappointed as the Minister for Saying Nothing, Doing Nothing, Breaking Every Promise I Ever Made and Keeping my Nose Clean In Order to Promote My Career - Which is Exactly What I’ve Done, Thank You Very Much.

The there’s the confused Clare ‘Resignation’ (or not, as the case may be) Short. Those of us who campaign against the World Trade Organisation are, according to The Principled One (or not, as the case may be), Luddites. We, as a nation, detested veal crates so vehemently that we had them banned. We felt similarly about sow stalls and got them banned. The use of steel leg hold traps was so abhorrent that we also got them banned and the use of animals to test cosmetics was so ludicrously unnecessary that they, too, were banned. Job done? Not quite.

Veal is still on sale as is meat from pigs held in sow stalls and fur coats and trim from animals who died in agony and shampoos that have been dropped into rabbits’ eyes. And all because to ban the import of these products from other countries is considered a restriction of trade by the WTO. It refuses to accept animal welfare considerations as a valid reason for restricting trade - or for anything else for that matter - even if you and I and nearly 25 million other people have democratically voted on the matter and won the argument within our own national parliament.

Three besuited men resident in Switzerland - who call themselves the WTO’s competition committee - men no one has ever heard of and certainly never voted for and who you wouldn’t recognise even if they snogged you, determine which bits of our legislation will be upheld and which won’t. That is democracy according to Clare Short and we are Luddites! Thanks for that legacy, Clare, what a wonderful contribution to ending suffering!

Then, of course, there’s fox hunting! The same Labour party promised a ban except that when they came to power they said, with a straight face, that they hadn’t promised a ban at all, merely a vote. It was then left to a private member to introduce a Bill which, without Government backing, was bound to fail. And fail it did, despite attracting a massive parliamentary vote in favour of a ban.

A couple of years later the same thing happened again - an overwhelming vote against all foxhunting and further inaction from the government. When, through massive pressure from its own back-benchers, the Government was finally forced to apologetically confront the Countryside Alliance and introduce legislation, it proposed to let ‘some’ hunting continue. You can’t be more contemptuous nor more anti-democratic than that.

Government handling of the genetically modified organism (GMO) debate also provides a salutary lesson. It began by throwing its weight behind the concept before it had even looked at the possible dangers and appointed Lord Sainsbury as Science Minister, a man who had previously headed a company set up to capitalise on GMOs.

His first action was to try and promote them through his family’s many stores (sort the democratic bones out of that one!). However, public resistance was so profound that the other supermarkets refused to touch anything remotely resembling a GMO and Sainsbury backed off.

But .... if you’ve made promises to the Monsanto’s of this world that you will provide them with a big, new marketplace, then you have to deliver or they’ll take their bat and ball elsewhere. And you do that by stealth. You form a panel and allow a few years to elapse in the hope that the opposition will get fed up. You help the process along by mostly appointing to that panel those who are on your side.

The report of the GM Science Review was due to be published in July, its first draft being written by a Monsanto director, believe it or not. Sadly for the Government, a key member of the panel resigned just before publication amidst allegations that the debate had been dominated by scientists either employed by biotech giants such as Monsanto and Syngenta or dependent upon them for funds.

For an even more appalling example of deceit and callous disregard for the public interest and animal suffering, we have to go back to the mysterious Huntingdon Life Sciences. As well as testing household products on all kind of animals - and having been exposed punching, abusing and screaming at terrified Beagles by undercover filming - the company is also involved in xenotransplantation research on behalf of multinational corporations.

Those who can produce animal organs that aren’t rejected by the human immune system will have found the holy grail and untold riches. The industry and Government are deaf to those scientists who predict that if animal to human organ transfers take place, it may well be the end of the human race as viruses leap the species barrier and trigger diseases to which we have no resistance.

There is equally little concern for the pain inflicted on animals. I cannot being myself to detail the incredible misery, suffering and death which is administered inside HLS, including on wild-caught baboons and other primates, but it was all officially recorded in print.

Thirty months ago, the drugs companies Imutran and Novartis won an injunction against Uncaged Campaigns of Sheffield, preventing the publication of these papers. In April, after a battle of titanic proportions, Uncaged managed to get the verdict overturned and the truth was revealed.

The 1,274 pages show a long list of animal welfare failures, including the suffering of unlicensed animals which were not investigated, the death of animals in transit, failure to enforce regulations, breaches of the law going unpunished and a calculated decision by the Home Office belittle the degree of suffering. An Imutran report sums up this utter betrayal. It says:

“The Home Office will attempt to get the kidney transplants classified as ‘moderate’ , ensuring that it is easier for Imutran to receive a licence and ignoring the ‘severe’ nature of these programmes.”

The papers show that xenotranplantation was depended more upon hype and hyperbole than science to keep the funds flowing, such as when Imutran announced to the world in 1995 that it would be ready to begin pig to human heart transplants within a year. The papers clearly reveal they were nowhere near that stage. Despite this, the Government has backed the programme both morally and financially.

It was aware of the 520 errors and omissions in the Imutran research, almost all of which would have meant increased suffering for animals and made a nonsense even of this pseudo science. But it didn’t stop it from giving Imutran the assurance on several occasions that new licence applications would be a ‘rubber-stamping’ exercise, despite this appalling catalogue of failure. Much of it was sanctioned by Ministers who have, predictably, rejected calls for an independent judicial enquiry.

They will, of course, stand at the next election and tell you what principled people they are and whichever lot is elected, they will continue to erode the democratic advances made by our parents and grand parents unless there are dramatic changes. Policy making is bankrupt of ideas with no lode star to guide it other than the short-term courting of powerful multinational corporations. God help the animals and god help us because their past record is a lesson in exploitation. Their future promises to be even worse.

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