Dr Theodore Dalrymple doesn’t pull any punches in telling it as it is.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) whose animal rights campaigns include seeking to end fur and leather use, meat and dairy consumption[1] claimed the scalp of US socialite Paris Hilton upon the occasion of her opening Julien Macdonald’s London Fashion Week. As Ms Hilton and Mr Macdonald were making their way to the after-show party they were pelted with flour bombs in a fur protest.

Whilst this largely American organisation does not resort to grave robbing and various other terrorist acts routinely committed by their hard-line British cousins, they are similarly afflicted by an aversion to the Truth.

The BBC reports that the spokeswoman for PETA Europe, Yvonne Taylor explained,

“There is nothing remotely fashionable about the torture and death of animals killed for fur.”

And,

“Julien Macdonald may have been able to ignore images of bloody skinned animals gasping for breath in the past, but hopefully a dash of flour[2] will help him rise to the occasion and forsake fur once and for all.”

Now, just hold on a moment,

“…nothing…fashionable about the torture and death of animals killed for fur.”

Animals bred for fur are not tortured.  The animal rights fraternity always claim that animals are tortured routinely by the humans processing them.  It is a blatant untruth.  Is it truly PETA’s case that animals bred for fur are skinned alive? If so, where is their evidence?

“…ignore images of bloody skinned animals gasping for breath…”

Oh dear.  This all smacks of hyperbole to me.  Now, where did I put those rotten eggs I was saving for Ruth Kelly…

[1] Vegans.

[2] Napoleon preferred a “whiff of grapeshot” to impose his will.

So says Grace Phillips in the Sunday Times on 5^th February 2006.  This follows the ill judged statement of intent issued by animal rights activists who threatened violence against all staff and students at Oxford by virtue of the University’s plans for a £20 million animal research laboratory.  You can do no better than read the report of Ms Phillips’ defiance.  There is more about the matter and student reaction to the threats, in a report by Patrick Foster and Nicola Woolcock in The Times (1^st February 2006).

I wish Ms Phillips well and I hope she is not subjected to too much intimidation by the faceless individuals who seek to terrorise anyone who opposes their view.  It would be a serious error of judgement for anyone to threaten her, because rather than being an “animal murderer” or “torturer”; she is merely holding a point of view.  It would not be only students who would turn against the “animal rights” movement.  Then again, those who God wishes to destroy, first he turns mad…[1]

I am not aware of the full circumstances in which a Danish newspaper felt it appropriate to publish cartoons which caused such insult to Muslims.  I am aware of the circumstances in which those cartoons came to be republished elsewhere and doubt the wisdom of them having been so.  I suspect it was less a case of those other newspapers exercising their right of freedom of speech but rather more of a raised middle-finger gesture of defiance.  I can understand Muslim anger, though its depth betrays a lack of understanding as to why the “secular” West behaves as it does.

I do not have any issue with a Muslim possessing the beliefs that he has.  However, for my part I do not accept that The Prophet spoke the words of God any more authoritatively than any of his predecessors.  I find that there are jarring inconsistencies in the theories of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.  I suspect that if I studied the other religions, I should find fault there too.  Persons of religious persuasions other than Islam would not take my heresy as an affront, however.  There lies the difference.  Only a tiny minority of fanatical “Muslims” would seek to annihilate “non-believers”[1] but I perceive that a small but significant part of the decent, law abiding majority of real Muslims still seems to feel uncomfortable about and is unable to accept people who do not subscribe to its views.  They do not have any concept of  “live and let live” and would prefer that we all lived in some form of worldwide Caliphate[2].  They acquiesce in the behaviour of the unacceptable, violent, unprincipled minority[3].

It is this absence of understanding of our point of view and lack of empathy for our feelings that causes our hostility, not Islam.  The rant of each fanatic conjures the spectre of every tyrant who sought to bring this island race to nought. Ordinary Muslims should dwell upon that.  We use our laws to bear down upon our miscreant racist minority.  It is time that they put their house in order and consider how we feel.

I need someone to tell me that this report today in the The Times, is not true.   Has not the Government more pressing matters about which to concern itself?

That slick, smoothy New Labour minister Ben Bradshaw says that pet owners have little to fear from this new charter of pets rights.  Forgive me if I remain unconvinced.

It appears that the law on prostitution could be changed following a “lengthy consultation process”.  Fiona Mactaggart, a junior Minister at the Home Office announced the Government’s new strategy last Wednesday 18^th January 2006.

Rejecting amongst other things, David Plunkett’s “red light zones”, the new proposals for instance suggest allowing “worker run” brothels involving two or three women, replace financial penalties for soliciting with an “intervention penalty” and amend legislation which results women convicted of soliciting being official designated as being “common prostitutes”.

This is all really “bog standard” New Labour reform, all style, no substance and it achieves little, if anything.  The idea of allowing up to three women work together is to enable them to “protect themselves”, we are told.  The intervention policy is to “ensure that prostitutes receive help with drug or alcohol problems”.  The term common prostitute is “outdated and offensive”.  All of these laudable aims could be achieved so much more effectively simply by a change of attitude to the idea of prostitution.

Ms Mactaggart’s real attitude to prostitution can be gleaned from various public pronouncements she has made this week and late last year.  Rejecting any suggestion that many women make a choice to undertake this life style and were workers in the ordinary sense of the word, Ms Mactaggart announced that,

“[It is] wrong to regard those involved in prostitution as sex workers…”

She went on to say,

“Tough measures were needed to tackle the markets for prostitution”

and

“I’m not tolerant of the view that prostitution is the oldest professional in the world and there is nothing we can to do to reduce it.  Prostitution blights communities…Men who use prostitutes are indirectly supporting drugs dealers and abusers.”

Last Wednesday, she was reiterating that,

“We are not going to eradicate prostitution overnight.”

To round off Ms Mactaggart’s fifteen minutes of fame we were treated to a television news item by the BBC where the Minister accompanied some vice officers on a curb crawler bust.  An unfortunate punter was detained and processed by the Police whilst the hapless young lady who had been the object of his attention was subjected to a condescending, patronising lecture by the all knowing Ms Mactaggart.

When you know that there are 80,000 prostitutes in the country, 95% of whom are dependent on crack and heroin and that they are all abused by their pimps, clients and are unfortunate victims of a cruel Society it is hard to take against Ms Mactaggart’s Wilberforcian crusade.

The problem arises when you examine the facts.  It is the Home Office that estimates (my emphasis) the number of prostitutes in this country.  Facts and figures emanating from the Home Office in recent years have been shown to be highly dubious and very often wrong.  In this age of New Labour spin so many facts and figures are massaged when being used in support of Government policy, it is hard to accept anything unless it can be independently verified. What of the statistic that 95% of prostitutes are crack and heroin addicts (not just drug users, of say cannabis, amphetamines or cocaine, but the seriously addictive substances?)  I do not believe it.  It is preposterous.

The arguments of those “in the know” who are more sympathetic to working girls are minimised and dismissed out of hand. The truth is that people who inhabit the sex industry need the protection of being involved in an activity which is lawful and socially tolerated, if not accepted.  Legalised brothels for instance would ensure protection of those persons involved in that section of the industry from violent criminals who current pimp and the abusive clients.  Health care for these workers (including drug counselling for the small number who need it) would be so much easier to provide. Social acceptance would raise the esteem of these working girls so much more than changing an old law that describes them as common prostitutes if they are convicted of soliciting more than once.  Does Ms Mactaggart intend to proscribe the use of words such as “tart”, “slapper” and “whore” (to name just a few) which are derogatory terms that have arisen over the years entirely because of the attitude of people like her towards the provision of sex for money?

The anti libertines might find comfort in the fact that less than half of men use prostitutes now than was the case in 1949.  They are winning the War. However, if they are deluded enough to think that prostitution can be eradicated, then they are fools.  It is natural for men to seek sexual gratification.  Women are naturally suited to providing that gratification for something in return, be that by way of a complicated social contract called marriage, cash or benefit in kind, or for the less adept, for free following the provision of too many alco-pops.  You are not going to be able to prevent these sex-for-money contracts without increasingly draconian (but ultimately ineffectual) laws.

To feminists, a woman selling her body to a man is subjugating herself to him, and this must not be allowed to happen.  Faced with evidence that a woman might choose to earn money in this manner, feminists ignore it, choosing to believe that the girls are forced into such behaviour by one means or another.  In their view of the Universe, men (which, for the theory to work, are all intrinsically evil) are always the cause for the girls' downfall.  As many working girls will admit, their choice to earn money by offering sex was made because they could not earn so much working as, for example, a sales assistant at Woolworths.  Many part time working girls (who I suspect, without anything other than empirical evidence, represent the majority) supplement their income even though they do possess other employment or forms of income.  Perhaps if the more mundane jobs were better paid, many girls would choose those and not sell sexual services, though I am not entirely sure.  Some women appear to be comfortable with the concept of charging for their services and do not feel that they have diminished themselves in any way by doing so.

That a few influential feminists had pronounced a Holy Jihad against prostitution was not of great significance.  We know who they are and instinctively take a pinch of salt with anything they say.  However, a more worrying development of recent years is the rise of a new Puritanism which has allied itself with the feminists. This is all the more worrying as New Labour is heavily infected by this Puritanism.  There is always something unsavoury about a creed that is so intense and inward looking that it wishes to impose itself upon unbelievers.  It is worse when that creed is laced with large helpings of hypocrisy.  It is a politically correct Puritanism.

Only fifty years ago, men who indulged in sexual practises with other men were considered by most “right thinking people” as disgusting perverts.  The most innocuous homosexual acts were punished with imprisonment for months and the more intimate acts were visited with sentences of years.  The uninformed “straight” majority were all convinced that these vile individuals were also routinely a threat to our children. The Police expended much time and effort tackling the “threat” that these practising homosexual males posed to Society.  Common sense eventually prevailed.  The bogus facts upon which bogus arguments were based were gradually exposed.  Homosexual behaviour was finally legalised and gay relationships absorbed into the mainstream of Society. As one of Kinsey’s subjects once announced when questioned about why he saw himself as a heterosexual male when he regularly indulged in the “habit” (as it was then called in the US, apparently) he answered, “sex is sex”.  Exactly. If consenting adults wish to indulge in a particular sexual activity, it matters not whether it is man on man, woman on woman or man on woman upon the payment of a fee of fifty quid.  Of course, homosexuality is protected by being one of those politically correct lifestyles/conditions and there lies the hypocrisy.  A woman charging for sex or a man being prepared to pay for it is no more reprehensible than two men wishing to be sexually intimate with each other, or any opposite sex couple indulging in pre marital sex.  Call me a Jeremy Benthamite, but I say that any consensual, adult human to human sexual behaviour should not be proscribed and the moralisers should butt-out and mind their own business.

Much misinformation is published to support the case of the New Puritans in their War against men and prostitutes.  We are led to believe that many women are trafficked to the United Kingdom and tricked or threatened into prostitution. Research in 1999 indicated that 0.06% of prostitutes found themselves in that unsavoury position.  The estimated number of prostitutes at the time of the survey was as it is now, that is to say, 80,000.00.  In other words, there were 48 women who had been trafficked and brought into prostitution by this means.  Of course, since this research was published, this current Labour Administration has admitted to having made a mess of immigration, so no doubt there are now a few hundred such girls; or 0.24% of the total.  Not a lot is it?  It is certainly not enough to warrant “eradicating prostitution”.

I have already stated that the figures concerning hard drug abuse amongst working girls looks dubious to say the least, but we have to examine what else the puritans have to say in this respect.  It is this equally fabricated fact; that the girls are introduced to drugs which are used to trap them into prostitution.  Forgive me for pointing this out, but it is highly improbable that 95% of our 80,000.00 working girls (that is 76,000.00 girls) were tricked into drug addiction so that they then had to become prostitutes.  Think about it.  It does not add up.  I do not have any gripe with the proposition that many girls use might use drugs.  It goes with the territory and the socio-economic class from which they derive in the main. That this use is other than largely recreational, under control and involves the “lesser” drugs, is simply not believable.  That some chaotic drug users do “go on the game” to pay for their habit is correct, but the point is that they were already heroin and crack addicts.  I would not even disagree that there are many hundreds of such girls.  I cannot imagine that they would have a lot of business, or repeat business. They are likely to be so desperate for a fix that they continue to brazenly solicit such that their arrest becomes inevitable and routine (and documented; Oh! And there the puritans have their evidence!)

In essence, the “case” against prostitution is just another example of dangerous, woolly thinking by those amongst our political classes who have an axe to grind, in this instance an alliance of feminists, moralists and fellow travellers.  It is complete and utter humbug.

“I don’t like what you do and I’ll fight to my dying breath to stop you doing it!”

Voltaire will be turning in his grave.

The current "hot" debate that has arisen in relation to the Animal Welfare Bill currently before Parliament has provided more evidence of our politically motivated classes being unable to think through the logical consequences of their prejudices, or of the cans of worms they open inadvertently.

I am not qualified to comment as regards the rights and wrongs of tail docking for "working dogs".  It makes sense to me that if the undocked tail of a dog will suffer repeated injury during its working life, then docking very shortly after birth is the answer.  Then again, routine docking of all dogs of certain breeds suggests that in many cases the purpose is more aesthetic, than for health reasons.  The problem I have with all the concern generated by the issue, leaving aside the waste of parliamentary time that is likely to result, is the fuzzy thinking that it discloses.

Tail docking is not a great moral issue of our time.  If it was, all such similar mutilation of mammal body parts would be up for debate.  As Byron Walmsley, a Consultant Urological Surgeon, says in his letter to The Times today (21^st January 2006):

"How can a Government that is so concerned for the welfare of puppy dogs' tails, continue to allow the practise of male circumcision for non-medical reasons?"

Quite.

Mark Honigsbaum and Alok Jha report in The Guardian today (14.01.06) about amongst other things, the tight security on site at Oxford University’s planned new animal research laboratory in South Parks Road, Oxford.  As will be well known, animal rights activists have used terror tactics in an endeavour to close down animal research establishments and intimidate anyone connected to them.  The previous contractor at this site withdrew after a campaign of intimidation against its shareholders. Now, workers of the new contractor are escorted to and from work each morning.  Commenting upon the security at the site, it is reported by Honigsbaum and Jha that the head of the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit, Superintendent Steve Pearl explained,

“In the past, activists haven’t hesitated to commit criminal acts against contractors and their suppliers.  Last year we also saw arson attacks on college boathouses.”

It had been noticed that the workers on site wore balaclavas which hid their faces.  Though it was admittedly cold, the protesters picketing the site remarked to the reporters that they did not believe that the balaclavas were for warmth alone.  A spokesman for the protesters is reported to have explained,

“Perhaps it’s because they are ashamed.”

That may be, that may be.  Then again, it might be that each worker appreciates that if his identity became known a dear departed relative’s remains might be unlawfully exhumed and secreted away by someone from a terrorist Animal Rights organisation or fellow traveller.

Since a child I have felt a little uneasy at the knowledge that an animal has been killed so that I can eat meat.  I have taken some comfort from the fact that I have been designed by Nature to be omnivorous[1] though I have never been entirely convinced by the pro-meat eating argument (most recently propagated by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall eloquently in his book “The River Cottage Meat Book”.)  However, because I have never been presented with a convincing, decisive argument in favour of vegetarianism, I have continued to be an “omni”.  It has not been uncommon for my meat eating prejudices to have been reinforced by half-baked, flawed arguments made by vegetarians in favour of their preferred diet, relying upon facts I know to be bogus.[2]

I was reminded of this when reading the letters page of The Guardian Weekend (14.01.06).  My attention was drawn to correspondence by Nitin Mehta from Croydon, provoked by an article in the same publication a week earlier, entitled “Super Green Me”.

Remarks Ms Mehta,

“Some 55 billion animals are raised and killed for meat every year.  Our planet is simply not big enough for these numbers. The result is destruction of rainforests, spreading of deserts and massive methane gas emissions.  The grain fed to these animals could feed almost 4 billion people…”

Leaving aside the dubious, funny figures quoted, the destruction of rainforest arises almost entirely by way of demand for wood (such as teak) from the First World.  Thus in the main, these forests are not cleared for agriculture and where they are, it is not exclusively for growing fodder for animals that are to be killed for meat.

The staple diet of the six million people currently living on this planet is not grain (in fact it is more likely to be rice.)  If the land to which Ms Mehta refers were put over to producing the type of vegetable foods[3]  that those 4 billion people actually wanted to eat, it could not support all of them.

Yes, methane is a greenhouse gas, but the Earth has always been full of it and remember this, the alleged Greenhouse Effect is still a hypothesis, no matter what the Media says to the contrary and some scientists would like us to think.

Woolly, lazy thinking like this is enough to make any reasonable person reach for their chicken roast.