Fahrenheit's Blog

Oh Lordy, I swore I wasn’t going to look at Cllr Jones’ blog for a while, not until my blood pressure calmed down a bit from last time, but Justin has been pressing me for more.

It seems the egregious Jones wants to ban the sale of foie gras.

While I agree that it’s produced in a rather gruesome way, this proposed ban is cowardly, opportunistic, and philosophically incoherent.

The major premise of the argument behind the ban is that cruelty to animals should be stopped per se. But if that is the goal then why attack foie gras? Its presence in the UK is negligible.

Why not attack the factory farming industry, who's battery hens and hormone-stuffed pigs peck and scratch at each other to bits in filthy overcrowded sheds? An industry where premature death rates of 30% are considered the norm? An industry many thousands of times the size of foie gras?

Why not attack the backstreet halal butchers operating right here in London, under Emma’s own nose where she could do something about it, where the wide-awake animals’ throats are cut and they bleed to death on the kitchen floor?

Because of course, Emma’s voters don’t eat foie gras. They wouldn’t miss out if it were gone, and because the stuff is associated with ‘the rich’ they can revel in a bit class hatred at the same time – knowing they’ve ‘stuck it to the toffs’ with their ‘barbaric practices’. It’s just a cheep political shot.

And the really cowardly thing is this: there are massive quantities of inhumanely produced meat being sold right here in the UK - right in the constituencies of people like Emma and Paul Blanchard (the York Councillor who originally proposed the ban), and they won’t do anything about it.

The real culprits; the people perpetuating this cruelty, are the supermarket value meat ranges, the fried chicken shops and kebab houses, the ready meals. The wave of imported, processed, rubbish that’s sold on the streets of Bruce Grove every day.

These are real problems, that Emma and her ilk could actually do something about. But they won’t.




UPDATE: For the record, I’m not particularly anti-meat, and I want to see as few things banned as possible (I’d rather people made up their own minds about what (if any) level of cruelty they were prepared to accept in their food production). What riles me is the hypocrisy: proclaiming yourself to be anti-animal-cruelty, but ignoring that same cruelty when it’s widespread among your voters.