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.

In one of the worst offerings I have ever read from a nationally known journalist (whose name isn’t Freedland, Aaronovitch, Harri, Harker or Young) this useless idiot falls back upon the boundless wisdom of the Great and Beloved God of the Universal Rainbow himself, St Nelson:-

Mandela quoted Chief Lutuli, who had led the ANC in the 1950s: “Who will deny that 30 years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of moderation?

... Mandela’s term for his control of Umkhonto we Sizwe was “properly controlled violence”. Seen simply in tactical and strategic terms, that phrase would be perfectly appropriate for the things that animal rights activists have been doing to the Halls, their friends, families, employees and neighbours. Digging up the body of Gladys Hammond - deeply shocking as it is - is nevertheless a very precisely calibrated act of terror. Not in moral but in these tactical terms, you could see it as a form of “properly controlled violence”.

It may be in the future that the use of large numbers of animals to test drugs, for which the motivation is often commercial, not humanitarian, will come to seem outrageous and that the treatment of animals in our society will be thought of as one of our great blindspots. (Nothing new there: ducks in Tudor England had their feet nailed to the floor so that their flesh would not be coarsened by exercise.) If that does happen, then the campaign to close down the guinea pig sheds at Darley Oaks Farm will surely look like a violent, necessary and ugly step on the long march to freedom.

It’s liberalism, you see.  The Long March To Freedom - not animal freedom, of course, but our own.  We must, we will be liberated from our base and oppressive natures and the end of history will dawn.  The Hall’s hamsters are one more oppressed minority whose freedom from oppression signals one more advance towards that happy day.

Don’t scoff.  Weak-brains like Nicolson who conflate animal rights with human liberty believe the same anti-racist, anti-male, anti-gender, anti-everything psychopathies as every other liberal.  And that’s why those other liberals would not intervene on the side of natural justice in the Hall’s case.