“Public turns on animal terrorists.  The proportion of people who approve of animal testing is at an all-time high.  Activists have fatally damaged their cause.  People are fed up with protesters’ thuggery.”

So runs the current headline at the Telegraph website.  The YouGov survey which uncovered this development is here.  The supporting articles written for it are here, here and here.

The lesson is simple enough.  After the Wall went down many far left activists looking for somewhere to exorcise their demons migrated into the animal rights movement.  They quickly turned it into animal rights extremism.  Where once it was Red Lion Square it became Huntingdon Laboratory.  But, to modify Newton’s Third Law, in our society extremist activisim unfailingly produces a reaction among ordinary people.  It offends against their inate sense of justice and moderation, and thank heavens for it.

But usually there is a modifier to this: it doesn’t matter.  Reaction is rarely directly transferrable to politics.  Very many issues, and animal rights is one, never arise at election time and thus a reactionary public has no purchase on events.  It must rely on its elected representatives to share its sensibilities.

In our time we have, with the great Marxisation of the zeitgeist since the 1980’s, seen that this does not work nearly well enough.  It is a flaw in the democratic process and it has allowed extremisms other than animal rights - and ethnic interests other than our own - to seize the tiller of our politics.  All the narrow egalitarian “movements” of the last forty years have been anti-democratic in this way, and continue to be so.  What else are the special interest groups, NGO’s and what-have-you but evidence incarnate that democracy has been subborned and the will of the people dismissed?

I really don’t know how much opinion polls like this one by YouGov cost.  More than interested parties such as the BNP can afford, no doubt.  Still, it would be extremely interesting and useful (and novel) to have opinion polled using the language of political freedom.  How would the native English population answer a question that asked, “Do you think it’s right that before the end of this century the English could lose their homeland to people from the Third World?”  Or “Should you be free to speak as you wish, within the bounds of common decency, and to associate with whom you please?”  Or “Should children be taught Marxist ideals at school?”

Any billionaire reader who has tired of the Champagne lifestyle and wants to do something useful for a change could do worse than think on that.