GUARDIAN DEBATE ON OXFORD UNIVERSITY ANIMAL LABORATORY

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*We must stand up to the creeping tyranny of the group veto*

 

The arguments around animal rights, Danish cartoons, Livingstone and Irving

have more in common than you think

 

*Timothy Garton Ash

Thursday March 2, 2006

The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>*

 

 

It was a bright cold day in February, and the digital watches were blinking

thirteen. Across the street from the concrete skeleton of a large building,

a noisy crowd was repetitively chanting " Stop the Oxford animal lab! Stop

the Oxford animal lab! " Just around the corner, at least 500 demonstrators,

among them many Oxford university students, gave their vocal reply: " Stand

up for science! Stand up for research! No more threats, no more fear! Animal

research, wanted here! " A student wordsmith had obviously worked hard on the

chants, which continued with " Pro-science! Pro-gress! Pro-test! " . Then there

crackled through an oldfashioned electronic megaphone the voices of Oxford

academics, a doctoral student and, most movingly, the mother of a disabled

child. They explained howprogress in medicine depends on carefully regulated

animal tests and called on us to resist the " animal rights terrorists " . A

large banner held aloft in the middle of the crowd proclaimed " Vegetarians

against the Alf " . Alf stands for Animal Liberation Front, the extremist

animal rights network which has attempted (sometimes violently, sometimes

successfully) to intimidate universities into not doing research on animals.

 

 

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Standing at the corner of Mansfield Road, I was proud of the demonstrators

who were reminding my university what, at best, it is still about: the

pursuit of truth and the defence of reason. Protests against student loans

or higher rents - these we expect. But here were students turning out on a

chilly Saturday morning to stand up for science.

 

At stake was much more than the particular issue of using scientific tests

on animals in order to save human lives. For a few minutes, Mansfield Road,

Oxford, was at the front line of a new struggle for freedom that is being

fought in many different places and guises. These days, the main threats to

freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of association no longer

come from the totalitarian ideological superstate that inspired George

Orwell to write his 1984. (First line, for the few readers who may not have

caught the opening allusion: " It was a bright, cold day in April, and the

clocks were striking thirteen. " ) That totalitarian horror still exists in

places like Burma, but the distinctive feature of this new danger is the

creeping tyranny of the group veto.

 

Here the animal rights campaign has something in common with the extremist

reaction to the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, as seen in the attacks on

Danish embassies. In both cases, a particular group says: " We feel so

strongly about this that we are going to do everything we can to stop it. We

recognise no moral limits. The end justifies the means. Continue on this

path and you must fear for your life. " I don't claim that the two cases are

strictly comparable. Human lives are saved by medicines developed as a

result of tests on animals; no comparable good is achieved by the

republication of cartoons of the prophet. But the mechanism of intimidation

is very similar, including the fact that it works across frontiers and is

therefore hard to tackle by national laws or law enforcement agencies.

 

If the intimidators succeed, then the lesson for any group that strongly

believes in anything is: shout more loudly, be more extreme, threaten

violence, and you will get your way. Frightened firms, newspapers or

universities will cave in, as will softbellied democratic states, where

politicians scrabble to keep the votes of diverse constituencies. But in our

increasingly mixed-up, multicultural world, there are so many groups that

care so strongly about so many different things, from fruitarians to

anti-abortionists and from Jehovah's Witnesses to Kurdish nationalists.

Aggregate all their taboos and you have a vast herd of sacred cows. Let the

frightened nanny state enshrine all those taboos in new laws or bureaucratic

prohibitions, and you have a drastic loss of freedom. That, I think, is what

is happening to us, issue by issue. These days, you can't even read a list

of the British war dead in Iraq outside the gates of No 10 Downing Street

without getting a criminal record. Inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, we

are becoming less free.

 

Let me now make a shocking leap in the argument. If you agree with me so

far, and believe that reason requires consistency, then you should want

David Irving let out of his Austrian prison and Ken Livingstone let off with

a rap over the knuckles. Why? Because the fateful tendency in all this is to

reject everyone else's group taboos while obstinately defending your own.

The result is indefensible doublestandards. In the case of Irving, and the

much less serious one of Livingstone, I have been struck over the past few

weeks by the contorted equivocations ofmy own group - by which I mean,

roughly speaking, liberal Europeans and English-speaking persons who believe

(as I do) that the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews was the greatest

single crime of the last century and should be a foundation-stone of today's

moral consciousness across the world.

 

Yes, say my fellow group-members (aka friends and acquaintances), Irving

should not have been sentenced to three years' imprisonment, but some such

lawis still needed. Not in Britain, they hastily add, but at least in

Austria. And: perhaps in a few years time the law will no longer be needed

even in Austria, but it still is now. Or: well, you're not going to weep any

tears for Irving are you?

 

This will not do. What is sauce for the Islamist goose must be sauce for the

fascist gander. What Irving says is horrible, an insult to the Jewish dead,

survivors and relatives, but on any reasonable assessment it does not result

in a significant threat to the physical safety or liberty of living human

beings. As for the possible return or continued propagation of fascism in

Austria: the greater (though still not very great) threat of that comes from

the anti-immigrant propaganda of extremist politicians like Jörg Haider, who

sit in Austrian parliaments not Austrian prisons.

 

If someone says " the Nazis didn't kill so many Jews and had no plan for

their systematic extermination " , he is a distorter of history who deserves

to be intellectually refuted and morally condemned, but not imprisoned. If,

however, someone says " kill the Jews " , or " kill the Muslims " , or " kill the

Americans " , or " kill the animal experimenters " , and points to particular

groups of Jews, Muslims, Americans or animal experimenters, they should be

met with the full rigour of the law. That's why, of all the recent

high-profile cases where free speech has been at issue, that of the

London-based hatepreacher Abu Hamza is the only one where I feel a criminal

conviction was justified. Not because he was a Muslim rather than a

Christian, a Jew or a secular European. No. Because he was guilty of

incitement to murder. This is the line on which we must take our stand.

Facing down intimidation, backed by the threat of violence, is the key to

resisting the creeping tyranny of the group veto. Here there can be no

compromise.

 

And that, I think, is what those students had instinctively understood when

they turned out for a very English little demonstration on a bright, cold

morning in Oxford. Orwell would have been proud of them.

 

*·* Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European Studies at Oxford University

 

 

www.timothygartonash.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,,1727749,00.html

Response

 

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*We're not terrorists, and we're not against progress*

 

Protesters against animal experimentation should not be caricatured as

anti-science, says Sharon Howe

 

*Friday March 10, 2006

The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>*

 

Despite his Orwellian imagery, Timothy Garton Ash's stereotypical

presentation of an enlightened pro-vivisection elite versus an ignorant and

destructive bunch of " antis " is hardly consistent with his declared belief

in the " pursuit of truth and the defence of reason " (We must stand up to the

creeping tyranny of the group

veto<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Guardian/Columnists/Column/0,,1721447,00.html>,

March 2). These principles are genuinely close to my heart. That's why I am

passionately opposed to animal experimentation. And that's why I am

returning my first-class Oxford degree as a personal protest against the

university's new biomedical research centre.

 

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Yes, animal testing has always gone on at Oxford. But the university has

also produced some eminent critics of animal-based research: John Ruskin

resigned his position as professor of literature the day after vivisection

was introduced.

 

It is ironic that Garton Ash should centre his argument on the importance of

free speech, as it is this vital privilege which is being eroded by the

injunction imposed upon those who wish to exercise their right to peaceful

protest - they are now allowed to voice their views outside the college only

between 1pm and 5pm on Thursdays.

 

It may make for better headlines to portray anti-vivisectionists as

terrorists bent on obstructing medical progress, but it couldn't be further

from the truth. The vast majority are compassionate individuals who find it

an outrage that millions of pounds of taxpayers' money is wasted on outdated

and misleading animal-based research, while doctors at Oxford's own

Radcliffe Infirmary are crying out for funds to invest in human-based stroke

research.

 

The time has come for a proper, reasoned debate: to get away from the

specious " dog or child " dilemma with which pro-vivisectionists seek to play

on our fears. The Home Office itself admitted that it " has not commissioned

or evaluated any formal research on the efficacy of animal experiments " .

 

Despite the fact that human brains can now be studied non-invasively using

hi-tech scanners, diseases such as Parkinson's - for which I am particularly

keen to see a cure as I watch my own mother suffer from its debilitating

effects - are still being painfully and artificially induced in monkeys who

do not naturally develop them.

 

But the tide of public opinion is changing. Plans for a similar animal lab

at Cambridge were abandoned after the university failed to prove a " national

need " at a public planning meeting. In 2002, MEPs voted for a complete

review of the use of all primates in experiments. And there has been strong

support among MPs for an Early Day Motion calling for an independent

scientific evaluation of the clinical relevance of animal testing - support

shared by 83% of GPs, according to a survey by Europeans for Medical

Progress.

 

The technology to achieve change already exists - it is institutional

inertia and vested interests that are holding back progress. Here is the

perfect opportunity to move forward and develop a centre of excellence for

cutting-edge, non-animal research which would only enhance Oxford's

reputation as a seat of human progress. Then I too could regain my pride in

being associated with it.

 

Sharon Howe is a graduate of Oxford university

sharon

 

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