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.
