(Graphic: Obey Bush by scalleywagproduction)

by John Andrews

1/15/07

Many moons ago, when I was a medical student, I remember having to do a physiology experiment along with my hundred or so fellow students. The doctor supervising the lab was a middle aged woman, eminently respected in her field, with degrees from prestigious universities on both sides of the Atlantic. She was a cold blooded creature, softly spoken and with pale blue eyes that stared expressionlessly at you as though you were a not very interesting growth in a Petri dish. She calmly demonstrated the experiment we all had to repeat. A trusting little white bunny rabbit was strapped to a bench and wired up to a machine that measured its blood pressure. The great scientist calmly sliced through one of the rabbit’s veins and softly asked us to observe how its blood pressure fell, and how soon death followed.

We were all medical students, for Christ’s sake, supposed to be moderately intelligent. What were the chances of a single person in that room not being able to work out that if an animal loses its blood, its blood pressure will fall and it will die? Could the slower ones amongst us not have learnt it from a book?

To this day I have mixed feelings on the vivisection debate. On the one hand I can’t wholeheartedly support the notion that all animal experiments are evil and totally unnecessary. Possibly the lives of many millions of people have been saved as a result of medication that would not have been discovered were it not for animal experiments. Yet on the other hand, I have personal experience of how ridiculous, pointless and obscene many (perhaps most) animal experiments are; and I always quietly applaud the masked vigilantes of the Animal Liberation Front who terrorise anyone with links to animal experimentation.

But vivisection is not the subject of this essay. Rather I would like to consider the tactics of the anti-vivisectionists, and pose the question: why do we not have similar groups equally committed to terrorising people who work in the arms industry, the slaves of real terror?

I was thinking about this the other day when another routine corruption scandal in Downing St flitted all too briefly across our TV screens. You may remember it – the British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, ordered the Serious Fraud Office to stop investigating ‘alleged’ corruption charges by the government’s chief arms maker, British Aerospace. The reason given for his Lordship’s obviously honourable intervention was his concern for protecting the public interest. It seems that one of the many issues disturbing his Lordship’s slumbers was the fact that several thousand jobs might be jeopardised.

Touching though his concern for British workers is, my first reaction was that no one with half an ounce of human decency should be involved with the manufacture of weapons of death and destruction anyway, and if the work of the Serious Fraud Office was likely to stop people constructing bombs, guns, landmines etc., etc. – well more power to their elbow. This is of course a common tactic of politicians. Whenever they want to justify their dubious actions, one of their favourite selling points is how many jobs they’re creating/saving/fighting for.

About twenty years ago a similar thing happened here known at the time as the Westland Helicopter Affair. The Ministry of ‘Defence’ decided they needed some attack helicopters to play with. Now they could have bought them from the US who produced them in such vast numbers that it would be relatively cheap to do so. But no. That would be too easy. Instead a special helicopter factory was built and 59 machines were produced. The government made sure that everyone knew how many jobs had been ‘saved’, but they weren’t quite so candid about the details of their sums.

Although about 755 British jobs were indeed ‘saved’, it transpired that the government could have bought the helicopters from America, given each of the 755 workers a million pounds in cash and still have saved the longsuffering taxpayer almost a billion pounds.

In other words, I don’t have any reason to believe that ‘saving’ British jobs in the ‘defence’ industry is doing the British taxpayer any favours whatsoever; and I shouldn’t think the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are going to be ruined by the efforts of these workers would shed too many tears if those jobs were lost.

It has to be time to take a leaf from the book of the anti-vivisectionists. Jobs are important of course. But there are jobs and there are jobs, and jobs in the armaments industry should be perceived as a pariah occupation – beneath contempt. It should be seen on a par with those involved with torturing animals for a living. Cluster bombs to Cruise missiles are assembled by ordinary human beings. These individuals need to be taken to one side and the error of their ways explained to them. They need to be directed to more honourable work – garbage collecting would do. Almost anything is more respectable employment than making machinery that will kill and maim mostly unarmed and defenceless poor people – possibly even animal experiments.

John Andrews leads a small but perfectly formed political party (www.freedemocrats.co.uk) committed to delivering real democracy to the British people for the first time in their history.