1) Defending Huntingdon Life Sciences, and other targets of direct action

2) Protest and the Old and New Politics

3) The Tyranny of Suffering

1) Defending Huntingdon Life Sciences, and other targets of direct action

Written 21 January 2001

The Huntingdon Life Sciences case merely highlights the liberal toleration of vicious protest, which is increasingly successful

In the course of a couple of years, bullying tactics, sometimes on a huge scale, have forced the closure of farms supplying cats, dogs, chimpanzees and rabbits to research and testing firms. Now, animals are flown in from countries with less vigilant welfare rules. Four mail bombs, a car bomb and the theft of a beagle pack this year young year alone all testify to the enthusiasm for hands-on protest against hunting and intensive animal husbandry.

The campaigners found the perfect way through to Huntingdon Life Sciences. It's a firm doing animal research work required by EU and UK law, and heavily monitored by democratically-sanctioned officialdom. Its staff and directors have remained stalwart in the face of vicious protest. But it was the financial service firms and banks which deal with it which proved the weakest link, in the face of menaces to staff. This "secondary" campaigning will now be used against any of the protestors' targets.

The Government has not until very recently much helped. It is, after all, in a great muddle about protest of every kind. On animal, it sends very mixed signals, not least by its acceptance of £1m from the rights lobby.

Last November, Labour pushed through Parliament a ban on fur farming in the UK. Mink farmers have been harassed and intimidated mercilessly for years and now their tormentors were rewarded with legislation. The Government's argument for the Act claimed "public morality" as demanding that the farming of mink be outlawed, when in fact vets and specialists who understand both systems are inclined to think that pig farming might make a better object of our concern.

The Government is likely to stand rather more firm when protestors move onto its own turf. "We took action to remove the crop to remove contamination from the British countryside and the jury accepted that", said Peter (Lord) Melchett, peer of the realm and at the time director of Greenpeace UK as he and 27 fellow Greenpeacers were found not guilty of criminal damage in Norwich in September. They had been charged following their trashing of an experimental field of genetically-engineered crops earlier this year. An unsuspected legal loophole lent Melchett's protest a spurious legitimacy, and if it becomes a regular ploy, New Labour will move to close it.

The contrast between the Government's response to fur and to GMOs nicely highlights the Blairite "take" on matters. Fur is, in the Government's wrong-headed view, an Old Britain concern, the kind of thing the Forces of Conservatism like. GMOs are, on the contrary, the White Heat of Technology (as a previous, modernising Labour project had it, in the 1960s), so Labour is likely to work quite hard to defend them. Similarly, science needs animals research, so Tony Blair has seemed to be prepared to try to defend it against protest.

But he does not seem aware that any activity - sporting, commercial or scientific - needs protesting against bullies.

Foxhunting, naturally enough, seemed to Labour to be classically Old Britain, and therefore easy to hate, even if that put one in bed with violent protestors. It will, however, soon cease to be an animal rights, or even a class, issue. It will become a matter of human rights. Indeed, the House of Lords - and perhaps especially the rump of hereditary peers - may soon come into its own as the one element in Parliament which is instinctively in favour of preserving an English sense of a subject's rights. That would be double whammy struck by the Forces of Conservatism.

The proposed Countryside Alliance demonstration on March 18 might just, however, be the undoing of this nice outcome. If the country people overplay their hand, are too cocky or whingeing in their protest, their ragbag coalition may yet seem too incoherent to matter and too obviously a matter of special pleading to be attractive. Besides, like last year's petrol protest, it may quickly look like bullying tactics.

Meantime, Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, looks out on a legal system which cannot be relied on to deliver the kind of order he quite rightly favours. Juries and many magistrates and judges seem extraordinarily relaxed about over-riding the right of democratically-elected government to go about its business. Long before the Greenpeace field trials case, in 1996 a jury refused to convict four women protestors for damaging Hawk trainer jets which the protestors thought might be used in support of obnoxious regimes overseas, but whose sale was in any case officially-sanctioned. Last week a Manchester jury refused to convict two Trident Ploughshares campaigners intent on criminal damage against a naval submarine.

In the absence of a strong parliamentary steer, the forces of law and order are in near-despair. The police know that much new legislation such as the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 are capable of striking the right balance between the rights of protestors, and the rights of their targets and the rest of us. But they are in a crisis of confidence. Yes, they (and the rest of us) got a partial result after the anti-capitalism riots in London last May: there were some convictions for the most violent behaviour. But police know from case after case, that courts will tolerate the law of the mob sooner than affront the idea of "free speech". The High Court has sent very mixed signals about street demonstrations and magistrates routinely take the part of protestors as they press the law on breach of the peace and obstruction well beyond breaking point. Without a much more vigorous approach, campaigners threatening people at home will do so with little fear of detection or condign punishment.

To do him credit, Jack Straw is looking at how to shelter shareholders and directors from the worst kind of intimidation, and has announced he wants to go further. He has seen through Parliament the Terrorism Act 2000 which will allow the law to describe as terrorists those rather few animal rights protestors who go so far as to use explosives. That may help the fight against bombers, such as whoever was at work in Cheshire, Yorkshire and the South East this month. But the Research Defence Society, which puts the case of those scientists who use animals, believes the Government is reluctant really to address the wickedness of menacing behaviour and threats, which go on mostly behind the scenes.

Philip Hockley, London's last remaining high-profile furrier, have recently been granted an injunction under the Harassment Act against their tormentors, who have responded with redoubled threats. The firm's staff can expect energetic and intelligent protestors to work round the law. For much of 2000, a small firm, Calman Links ("the Royal Furrier" in Knightsbridge) was subject to intimidation tactics at the shop and the homes of directors and staff. Another one-shop furrier, Zwirn, in the West End, had an injunction in place, but faced intimidation at home addresses. Both have now gone out of business. The wearing of fur is, of course, perfectly legal in this country, but Hockley, even with its injunction, has been under intermittent picketing by howling activists who scream abuse at anyone entering or leaving the shop and openly proclaim their intention of taking the intimidation to people's homes.

We are drifting into a situation where force, damage to property and the use of fear are accepted by passionately opinionated people as justified in the pursuit of strongly-held causes. The pity of it is that people proud of their liberalism tacitly support the approach. The "liberal elite" is too keen on standing up for minority voices to notice that these are often vicious as well as vacuous. Firms should not have to be brave, they should only have to be legal.

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2) Protest and the Old and New Politics

This is a version of a piece published in The Observer in March 1995

People are fighting hard for the countryside around Newbury, and goodness knows, most of us are rather glad. We are watching, at the very least, protestors bearing witness to everyone's sense of loss. Their actions are even a species of martyrdom (though one hopes it does not come to that in any strict sense).

In the summer of 1940, the artist Rex Whistler painted himself painting an ordinary English farmland scene, in whose defence he was shortly to die. The image makes a perfect statement about the way the run of the mill countryside (perhaps especially as rendered by Constable at Flatford) deeply inspires English people. Memories and pictures of it make our psyche. They represent the balance and harmony which we think is our national heritage. Country scenes have always spoken to us of the way we do our politics: "a nation at ease with itself", calmly and competently run from Parliament to pub.

Of course, actually the place was and is riddled with tensions, and the rosy view was and is widely scoffed. Indeed, I take it that our aging warrior generation was fighting for both informal and formal democracy. They were fighting for the rights of those who go in for bloody-minded free speech quite as much as for the right to be governed by people they elect.

But there is another way through the thickets of argument. It is fashionable to celebrate the New Politics of special interest groups, as they operate in tandem with the media and lawyers, challenging the Establishment. The standard, liberal, view of this process (and you can read it the intelligent and wise Andrew Marr in the Independent, or hear it from Jonathon Porritt, George Monbiot and other greens) is that at last people have been empowered, or grabbed empowerment. People are reported to be in need of this empowerment variously because: the first-past-the-post electoral system disenfranchises the majority of the electorate; because people have learned not to trust Government because it lies or has a growth-orientated agenda; because - in modern lofty sociological thinking - conventional politics cannot capture the spiritual and intellectual values held by many modern citizens. And then there is the peculiarity that we have elected (for the second time since the war) a party to rule for a long time, so that a casual dissident senses it to have the qualities of a regime.

New Labour, perhaps conscious of a need to respond to some of these feelings, is arguing that people want to be stakeholders in society and the economy. This presumes they are presently denied their proper role. Actually, it is easy to become a stakeholder: the magistrature has for years begged people of every sort to present themselves for service on the bench; one can buy shares (and import an ethical dimension to a company's concern, if one wants); there are thousands of schools which would relish livelier parental support; and the burgeoning Quango state is a fertile ground for citizen involvement (without the dreariness of old-fashioned local politics as a disincentive). Nor, of course, is conventional politics dead, and the parties all cry out for people to join them. Those people who take an active interest in helping to run the world around them often bemoan, not the lack of opportunity for people to help take up the burden of voluntary involvement, but the scarcity of people willing to shoulder the work.

Many of us social couch potatoes feel a sort of guilty admiration of those who protest. We are happy, so to speak, to pay for the bricks they throw. We may think them tiresome, but they have a point, and are making it in part for us. They speak to our unease about our materialism.

It is a feature of modern British democracy (and not all bad) that it has found a way of giving most people a society and economy they more or less like. Nationally, we are perhaps too good a member of the European Community to protect animal rights as the soft-hearted British would like (and that has brought surprising people on to the streets). And certainly many of us feel the state heeds the millions of car owners with too little regard for the countryside we also love.

Our democracy is pretty good at divining what the national will is, and to weighing many of our competing urges. It does so imperfectly, of course. In the case of Newbury, this brings the millions of motorists down in favour of fast and cheap roads, with a minority (perhaps quite a significant proportion of people very locally) seriously mourning the damage to the countryside. The vulgar is triumphing over the valuable: always a risk in a democracy, of course.

Actually, it is quite wrong to say that the Government steam-rollers most development. Private developers of supermarkets, factories, or anything else, face a planning system which bends over backwards to enshrine decent conservationist values, and encourages local people (and the professional campaigners who espouse their case) to come forward with their contrary views. The planning system is one the greatest triumphs of our democracy, and - contrary to myth - accounts for the slowness of the concreting of Britain. The French, who know a thing or two about running an elitist society for the glory of the whole nation, would be appalled at how hard it is to get anything built here.

The difficulty for Government at Newbury is not simply a matter of national will meeting local opposition. For all the lip-service paid to the idea that the New Politics expresses "community" interests, it remains an awkward truth that, say, Newbury, would probably vote in favour of its bypass: locals can be vulgar, too.

It is, however, true that the planning system, especially with national projects like a trunk road, is not clever at negotiating the natural local interest, and the minority specialist interest, in producing an expensive scheme. The local interest and the conservation interest would vote for a road with all the costly bells and whistles, paid for by the nation, to preserve countryside as best as possible, consistent with getting the scheme done. The system instead says: the State proposes such and such a scheme, take it or leave it. The Treasury, who are only, but thoroughly, remembering what the nation's taxpayers say about robbing their pockets, will ensure the scheme is cheap and cheerful. Under Treasury rules, roads schemes are allowed or disallowed according to a principle that is dear to many greens: that environmental disbenefit should be should be given cash value. Unfortunately, the cost-benefit analysis has elements of farce about it: the most valued (usually scruffy) bits of our countryside are costed at zero.

Oddly enough, the kind of money required to make the Newbury bypass more benign ecologically (if not perhaps the tunneling which would obviate the need for it at all) is about the kind of money (œ12 million was the reported figure this week) required to police the protest. The best that can be said for this expenditure is that it may help transform the national debate for future projects. It might, even now, send some aspects of the road's planning back to the drawing board.

England has funny - supple, pragmatic, muddled, and elegant by turns - ways of negotiating its way forward, and I celebrate most of them. But the tax-payer is paying for an expensive charade at Newbury. The protestors can just as easily be described as spongers as stakeholders. They represent nobody and are accountable to nobody. They have no interest in, and probably won't like, the slightly less messy compromises their urging may produce in the future. More important they are not the finest flower of our freedoms, but living proof that we have neglected our formal process of democracy.

The protestors' powerful, often well-heeled and even Tory, supporters would be better employed enriching the formal democratic process so that it is better at finding the real price the country might pay for its motoring. There are myriad groups, from the National Trust, through the Council for the Protection of Rural England, to the Town and Country Planning Association, let alone the local authorities, and the best greens, which are itching to argue the follies of the way we plan roads.

Some of these bodies may be a little tired, and they have little history of co-operation. They are used, individually, to being sidelined. But they could easily sink their differences to rally round a few crucial policy changes, and deliver real clout. They would be proposing boring things, like changes to the Cost Benefit Analysis system by which ministers judge a development's viability. But they could make their representations with a real claim to membership or electoral support. They would be virtuous, legitimate, and terrifying to politicians. If they did start effectively to bully the system, we could say, not merely that protest has been thoroughly disenfranchised, but that the best of its values are enshrined in the ballot box, not the treetop.

The modern young seem not to be following their parents in wrapping themselves in the rainbow, or any other alternative visions. They seem more interested in parties than in paradigms. Their middle-aged parents wonder whether years of Thatcherism, and modern anxieties about work, mean that their offspring have a regrettable lack of fire in their bellies. Or is it simply that their children have lived alongside science and technology for all their lives, and been taught about them rather well? They aren't easily frightened out of a certain confidence that modern people know what they are about.

The coming generation may even accept that they are lucky to live in a well-governed society, in which industry, scientists, environmental regulators - even politicians - are not part of a conspiracy to wreck our world and corrupt virtue. Far from it: for twenty years it is the campaigners who have been manipulative, conspiratorial, and desperately economical with the truth. They will be infinitely more interesting - and far more use - if they become half as open, honest and accountable as academic experts, businesspeople and government.

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3) The Tyranny of Suffering

This was run in the Independent in the wake of the Dunblane school shootings.

Today Parliament will vote on what handguns to ban. Terry Dicks MP will tell us whether the Snowdrop campaigners - the parents of Dunblane - are anything like satisfied. Only the very hard-hearted will wonder at the wisdom of this alliance between the maverick reactionary and an association of the scarred. This is the New Politics, in which the popular voice is heard. It certainly has very attractive elements about it.

In the past couple of years, we have seen the development of new pressure groups whose common denominator is suffering. They have antecedents in the development of groups representing people who were the victims of accidents like Hillsborough, the Marchioness and the Herald of Free Enterprise. Now we have groups representing the victims of the street: of drug-pushers and stalkers, of knives and guns.

We are bound to listen to these sufferers. But there are obvious absurdities. Ann Pearston of Snowdrop, lobbying for handgun control, was quoted yesterday as she opined on the rumoured imminence of legal action against the police authority by policemen who had been traumatised by the massacre. This surely, is no more her business than anyone else's?

More generally, what on earth would H G Wells have made of the entire tendency? He wrote: "The British masses neither rule nor want to rule. They are politically apathetic. They do not produce outstanding individuals to express their distinctive thoughts and feelings...". He points out: "Slave revolts, peasant revolts, revolts of the proletariat have always been fits of rage, acute social fevers which have passed". The equivalent is a now a moral panic.

It's true, surely, that most of us regard good government as government which requires no work from us. Equally however, a hundred years or so of free education really ought to have a produced a society in which nearly everyone is articulate. Cassette recorders and home videos were bound to tool people up to transmit as well as receive.

It does not matter that the people campaigning necessarily lack experience. The Labour MP Tony Wright - author of Citizens and Subjects: An Essay on British Politics - robustly defends the erosion of the power of "those of us who are paid to take an interest in everything all the time". It is hardly surprising, he says, that citizens take an interest in an issue only when it crunches against their own lives: "I'm only interested in the workings of my car when it breaks down".

And it is good that the old class trench warfare of the political parties is being replaced by the sniper action and guerrilla movements of the new apolitical campaigns, which form and dissolve by the hour.

But the new groups only have a claim on our attention. They have no monopoly on the truth or even public-spiritedness. To the extent that speaking out is a form of therapy the rest of us are free to wonder how much to listen to lines of argument which are put, not on their own merits necessarily, but as part of a process which may do the sufferer much good, but do the rest of us small or great harm. The campaigners and their arguments may not be wise or even particularly nice.

Paul Betts, the father of Leah, who died after taking Ecstasy a year ago last Saturday, defends not merely his right to be heard, but also the quality of what he says. "I can talk from the heart about what it is like losing a daughter, but when I talk about drugs, it's the BMJ [British Medical Journal] and specialists in hospitals that I quote". He has, in short, been on a crash course in drug-related problems. He insists, too, that his is no populist, reactionary campaign: "Our point of view is simply awareness, we've never told anybody "don't to it"'.

Yet we need quietly to assert that politicians, at least politicians taken together, are wiser and nicer than the rest of us - sufferers included. It is Parliament that makes us empty our pockets to the poor. And whilst we are mostly squeamish, we are also mostly in favour of hanging as the way to produce less suffering and fewer victims, and it is parliamentarians who detect a wrongness in this solution.

Of course, in a sense Parliament was always wrong, or at any rate laggardly and reactionary. It has always defended yesterday's ordering of society and yesterday's morality. When we hear the conflict between the new righteous - and what could be more obviously right than the voice of the suffering? - and the obduracy of Parliamentarians, we know who to support.

We should be a little cautious. Parliament has usually been the battleground between the silent majority and the powerful minority. Now, things are more complicated, and more fluid. Martin Durham, an academic at Wolverhampton University who discusses the influence of "morality" campaigns on politics, points out that when we listen to victims we will not necessarily hear a coherent voice. He says: "The subway killing in New York produced a victim who turned Democrat because she wanted gun control, but also a Republican who argued for the right to carry concealed personal weapons for self-defence".

So someone wanting to fend off a new tyranny of the suffering would not merely have few political allies, but not know where to seek them. Yet, oddly, at least sometimes, the sufferers are arguing against a strong majority interest. Most of us would like to be able to drink a bit more before we drive, and the evidence says that if we are middle-aged we would be unlikely to hurt anyone as we do so. Most young people would like legally to be able to smoke dope and perhaps (more ambiguously) take Ecstasy, and mostly feel them to be smaller risks than would otherwise be attractive. Few of us use handguns or combat knives, but many of us wonder whether the existence of the hardware in itself represents the source of the harm.

As Tony Wright says, even as he cheers on the New Politics: "I am against fundamentalism of any kind, whether it is about animals, drugs or guns." He adds: "Generating an engagement is wholly positive. But that doesn't mean the campaigners' policy conclusions are always right". Parliament needs to avoid developing listening skills, at least if that implies that it becomes prone to fad.