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A Study of Anarchist and Parliamentary Left Approaches to Animal Advocacy in Britain

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A Study of Anarchist and Parliamentary Left Approaches to Animal Advocacy in Britain Legislate or Liberate? A study of anarchist and parliamentary left approaches to animal advocacy in Britain. by Will Boisseau A Doctoral Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy. Loughborough University February 2016 © Will Boisseau 2016 1 Abstract This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by exploring parliamentary left and anarchistic approaches to animal advocacy using a Critical Animal Studies (CAS) framework. This is significant because CAS is a field of scholarship which developed in order to theoretically support animal activists; nonetheless, in its focus on direct action and its rejection of reformist politics, CAS has too often ignored the legislative developments which are extremely important to most animal activists. Therefore, this thesis makes an overarching claim that CAS scholarship should treat the relationship between direct action and legislative reform more seriously. This thesis considers the relationship between direct action activists and legislative politics and as such makes a useful contribution to both CAS and wider animal rights scholarship. More broadly, the thesis provides a particularly useful assessment of one social movement at a time of rapidly changing moral, political and activist landscapes as Britain enters a new ‘age of dissent’. The work consists of three parts: the first part provides historical and theoretical information about the movements under consideration, which provides context for the rest of the thesis; the second part considers two themes – class and gender - that are central to leftist and animal rights literature, in order to consider important dimensions in the history of animal advocacy in Britain; and the third part, the case studies, scrutinise the framework by analysing how animal activists have dealt with certain key issues in practice. Throughout these chapters I analyse the central research questions which explore the relationship between direct action and legislative politics in terms of animal activism; in particular, what separates such approaches and how have activists pursuing different overall strategies been able to work together. The thesis adopts a CAS methodology, which includes the triangulation of archival material alongside interviews and a range of primary and secondary sources. The core originality of the thesis lies in the interview material conducted with 55 animal activists including politicians, scholar-activists, direct action campaigners, vegan outreach organisers and political lobbyists. The thesis explores the different approaches and relationships between parliamentary left and anarchistic animal activists by analysing four key themes: speciesism, the rights- liberation-welfare debate, direct action and total liberation. Throughout the thesis I ask if different activists can be separated dichotomously in relation to these themes, and how animal activists of different ideologies relate to these concepts and themes. Aside from the core contribution to animal advocacy scholarship, the thesis also contributes knowledge to British social, cultural and political history, as well as to anarchist studies and social movement studies. Key Terms: Critical Animal Studies, Animal Advocacy, Anarchism, Parliamentary Left, Total Liberation, Speciesism 2 Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Anarchism and Animal Advocacy 74 3. Animal advocacy and the British parliamentary left 111 4. ‘Ordinary Unenlightened People’: Class and Animal Advocacy 149 5. ‘Everything fits together’: Gender and Animal Advocacy 194 6. Case Study 1: Hunting: ‘A “them and us” issue’ 230 7. Case Study 2: Vivisection: ‘We are up against big business’ 276 8. Case Study 3: Vegan Outreach: ‘A philosophy and not a diet’ 322 9. Conclusion: ‘Social change is messy’ 364 10. Bibliography 389 3 1. Introduction In Free The Animals, Ingrid Newkirk’s fictionalised account of the animal liberation movement, Valerie, who forms the North American Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the early 1980s, soon finds it necessary to travel to England – ‘the bastion of animal rights activism’ - for advice and training from the movement’s founders.1 In London, Valerie visits the offices of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), a national animal rights organisation which has campaigned for legislative action since its formation in 1898. Valerie meets Kim Stallwood, the BUAV’s Campaign’s Officer: ‘a vigorous Labour Party supporter and a fervent champion of the British working class as well as of the animals’.2 Stallwood is busily campaigning for parliamentary legislation to prohibit eye-irritancy tests conducted on rabbits; a slow process and one which will meet with much opposition ‘both from private research corporations and what he called the “Tory Gories”’.3 However, it is not Stallwood who Valerie has travelled to visit; the American activist knows that the BUAV share an office with the ALF Supporters’ Group and so she aims to meet Ronnie Lee, who co-founded the ALF in 1976. Whereas Stallwood, a socialist, focuses on parliamentary campaigns and pressurising the Labour Party to enact progressive legislation, Lee, an anarchist, believes that direct action from a non-hierarchical, grassroots organisation will bring about animal liberation. As the fictionalised Stallwood says of Lee: He thinks we’re all wet, you know… thinks there’s only one way to go: direct action, animal liberation… Thinks what I do, what the BUAV does, is a waste of bloody time the animals can’t afford. If you ask me, the animals need everything.4 In reality, these relationships are more complex and intertwined, as interviews with both Stallwood and Lee in this thesis show; nonetheless, Newkirk has identified 1 I. Newkirk, Free The Animals: The amazing true story of the animal liberation front in North America (New York: Lantern Books, 2012). 2 Ibid, p. 38. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. p. 39. 4 the two broad strategies used by animal advocates in Britain since the rise of the radical animal rights movement in the mid-1970s: anarchistic direct action and legislative change in association with left-leaning parliamentarians. Anarchists and the parliamentary left This thesis focuses on activism in Britain since the mid-1970s, and seeks to uncover the lost history of animal rights activism whilst analysing the relationship between animal activism and the British left. 1976 can be seen as the date marking the resurgence, if not the birth, of the radical animal rights movement in Britain; not only because of the formation of the ALF but because national animal protection organisations united to create Animal Welfare Year in an attempt to put animal protection on party political agendas.5 As we shall see, these two wings of the broad animal advocacy movement took the form of anarchistic activists engaging in direct action and lobbyists who engaged with politicians (chiefly in the Labour Party) to promote animal protection legislation. Although the radical animal advocacy movement has grown since the 1970s, and has shifted leftward since the days of the first conservative animal welfare societies,6 the first two chapters show that there was a longstanding historical and ideological connection between the British left and animal issues. For instance, early Labour politicians such as Ramsay MacDonald, J. R. Clynes, Philip Snowdon and Arthur Henderson were all significant opponents of vivisection in the first decades of the twentieth century.7 These Labour leaders also played a significant role in opposing hunting. For instance, the inaugural public meeting of the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports in 1925 was attended by numerous Labour politicians.8 In 5 C. Hollands, Compassion is the Bugler: The Struggle for Animal Rights (Edinburgh: Macdonald Publishers, 1980). 6 The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) founded in 1824, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) founded in 1898. H. Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). 7 E. Hopley, Campaigning Against Cruelty: The Hundred Year History of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (London: British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, 1998), p. 36. 8 League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports, ‘Messages of Sympathy and Goodwill: Received on Inaugural Public Meeting, November 25th 1925’ (TUC Library, HV47/25). 5 2015 the Labour Animal Welfare Society believed that this political lineage included figures as diverse as George Lansbury, Kier Hardie, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw and Christabel Pankhurst.9 Chapter three will show that connections between the British left and animal advocacy were strengthened in the 1890s by activists such as George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter and, in particular, Henry Salt. Salt’s most significant work, Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1894), pre-empted many contemporary concerns of leftist animal advocates. In particular, Salt argued that animals and the working-class were oppressed due to power structures which operated in similar ways; Salt also believed that compassion for one oppressed group should automatically entail compassion across the species divide. Salt’s ideas were largely ignored by most of the British left for much of the twentieth century, but in the 1970s Labour once again adopted policies which aimed to protect animals.10 Salt’s ideas also helped formulate the concepts (although not the exact terms) of intersectionality and
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