On July 25th BBC2 aired a powerful, half-hour piece of investigative journalism titled, “The Siege of Darley Hall Farm.  It charted:-

... five years of guerrilla warfare directed against John Hall, a guinea-pig farmer whose stock is bred for medical experimentation ...  [It] revealed how the tentacles of extremism exert a stranglehold first over one enterprise, then a series, and from here an entire community.  Stories of personal courage abounded as the Animal Liberation Front’s campaign intensified from dire warnings and attacks against property to arson, accusations of paedophilia, murder threats, and, finally, body snatching.

Altogether, the farm and its surrounds have endured 290 protests and 170 incidents of violence and intimidation.  In March a High Court judge refused the area an exclusion zone, while defining these actions as a terror campaign.  The ALF, it would seem, is not the only perpetrator of inhumanity.

Today we learn that the terror tactics, and specifically the stealing of the remains of the Hall family’s grandmother, were successful.  The Halls will abandon animal breeding in the hope that her remains will be returned.

The legal system badly failed the Halls.  No less importantly, it has failed the cause of scientific research in Britain and it has failed all of us.  Why?

When I consider the rush to protect Muslims through anti-British religious hate speech law, to bring Nick Griffin and his co-defendant to court for predicting 7/7 and to hound John Tyndall to his grave, I can only conclude that the legal will exists in spades if the “offender” suits the liberal establishment.  As far as I know the New Labour clique aren’t militant vegans.  The Animal Liberation Front has no members among Labour MP’s.  So is it that a residual 1960’s Student Union admiration for action directe is at work in them?  Is left-organised protest always allowed to pass because there are, as everybody knows, “no enemies to the left”?

ALF is everybody’s enemy.  Can anyone explain why it is not seen by our betters for the evil it is and stopped in its tracks at the outset?

UPDATE

Adam Nicolson, writing in the Guardian (where else?), has answered all my questions.

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