Friday 21 April 1995

BAN THE TRADE, NOT THE PROTESTS


New Statesman & Society leader, 21 April 1995

The trade in live animal exports is morally repugnant – and by trying to prevent protests against it the police are stepping on basic rights

When the protests against live animal exports from British ports began last year, they divided left and liberal opinion down the middle.

For some, the outrage at the export of veal calves and other animals was a proportionate response to a cruel and unnecessary trade, an expression of a healthy public concern for the wellbeing – or even the rights – of animals. For others, the talk of animal rights smacked of anthropomorphism: to them, the demonstrations were no more than a macabre symptom of a deep-rooted British sentimentality about animals, the protesters people whose worries about soon-to-be-eaten sources of chops and escalopes had never been equalled by concern for their fellow human beings.

This argument will run and run, for the simple reason that both sides have a good case. For what it's worth, NSS comes down in the end on the side of those who would like the export of live animals banned. It undoubtedly causes unnecessary suffering – there is no reason whatsoever that the veal calves and sheep should not be reared and slaughtered in Britain and exported as meat – and causing unnecessary suffering to animals dehumanises those who do it. One does not have to embrace the anthropomorphist notion of animal rights or be a hopeless sentimentalist to believe that cruelty should be stopped.

But this week, all that is in many ways beside the point. Even if we supported the export of live animals, we would argue that those who did not had an inalienable right to protest peacefully against the trade. And that right has now been seriously infringed by the actions of Essex police.

Last week, they delivered a letter to the residents of Brightlingsea informing them that anyone who organised a protest against the resumption of animal exports from the small port this week would be prose­cuted under the 1986 Public Order Act. The threats had the desired effect. Brightlingsea Against Live Exports, the local pressure group that had organised protests of several thousand people earlier in the year, disbanded itself. And on Tuesday, the day that live exports resumed, only 350 people, many of them outsiders, turned out to demonstrate.

According to Liberty, the civil liberties campaign, this use of the 1986 act is unprecedented: until last week, the police had not used their powers to ban marches and demonstrations. Although the police did not carry out their threat to make arrests, the danger is that Brightlingsea sets a precedent not just for animal exports protests, but for any demonstration that the police believe might be a little difficult to control.

The 1986 Public Order Act was intended, we were told at the time it was passed, to deal with serious disruption of the life of the community, serious threats to public order and serious intimidation. The government assured sceptical civil libertarians (and in those far-off days, they included the Labour front bench) that it would not be used to impose blanket bans on protest.

Yet in Brightlingsea the police did just that. A protest movement that has involved a majority of the local popu­lation cannot be said to be a major disruption to commu­nity life; nor can non-violent direct action – which is all that the overwhelming majority of the protestors have engaged in – be considered either a threat to public order or intimidatory.

Of course, the policing of protests such as that in Brightlingsea is expensive. Essex police estimate that the policing of the Brightlingsea demonstrations has cost them an extra £2 million, while recent parliamentary answers reveal that the total extra policing costs incurred by the live animal export protests has been more than £6 million. It is also obviously true that police who are at demonstrations are not catching criminals, doing their paperwork or helping old ladies across the road.

Sometimes, however, the exercise of fundamental democratic rights – and there are few more fundamen­tal than the right to free assembly – means that money and police time must be spent in ways the police find wasteful. And if the police really cannot afford the money or the hours involved in dragging non-violent protesters from the paths of sheep lorries, they should simply tell the would-be exporters that they have more important things to do than expedite their business.