ANOTHER VOICE
Beware of the scum which collects on the middle ground
AU BERON WAUG H
Ilearned my campaigning tactics in the rough training ground of politics,' says 33-year-old Gavin Grant, campaign direc- tor of the RSPCA. 'I was campaign director for the Liberal Party when, as part of the Alliance, it surged to popularity in Britain. And as Alliance candidate in the 1983 election I halved Paul Channon's majority in his "safe" seat at Southend West.
`My methods are hard-hitting — but in 1989 they have to be. And I'm prepared to shock and continue to shock to stop the slaughter.'
The 'slaughter' to which he refers is the alleged slaughter of 1,000 dogs a day by the RSPCA and other bodies. The 'shock' to which he refers is that caused by the RSPCA's new advertising campaign in support of dog licences which shows a huge pile of dead dogs.
Oddly enough, it was uncertainty about the Liberal Party's attitude to dogs which prompted my only foray into national politics, when I stood as Dog Lovers Party candidate in the general election of 1979 against a Liberal incumbent whom I sus- pected, rightly or wrongly, of insufficient concern for our four-legged friends. In the event, I suppose I can claim that my intervention in North Devon helped turn Jeremy Thorpe's Liberal majority of 6,721 into a Conservative majority of 8,473 — a slightly more significant result than Gavin Grant's in Southend West. The only useful lesson I learned from the episode was to mistrust Liberals. I never dreamed they would take it upon themselves to flaunt their peculiar attitude to dogs by forcing us to contemplate whole mountains of slaughtered dogs over the breakfast table. The appalling Mr Grant has other horrors in store:
Our campaign video, Deadline, features a stray called Danny that gets lost. The origin- al script had Danny saved after a harrowing week. But I changed that. In the video Danny is put down . . . because that's what happens in real life.
I had heard of these films in which someone is actually murdered in front of the cameras. They are called 'snuff-videos' and are very popular, I believe, in Califor- nia and parts of New York. I hope I am wrong in thinking the RSPCA would spon- sor a doggie snuff-video, murdering an unfortunate animal for the edification of the multitude. Perhaps these hard-hitting methods are indeed necessary in 1989, but I hope the young man's enthusiasms do not lead him next to Save the Children or Child Poverty Action groups. Mountains of dead children, or snuff videos showing children in the process of dying, might go down all right in advanced Liberal circles, but I can't see them working very well with the man and woman in the street, even in a good cause.
Although I never dreamed when I stood against Thorpe in North Devon that the Liberals were planning a nationwide holo- caust or hecatomb of dogs, the most useful lesson I learned, as I say, was to mistrust Liberals. They are nearly all liars and many of them are crooks. Although I am not for a moment suggesting that Gavin Grant belongs to either category, I feel bound to point out that few of those who were affronted by the double-page RSPCA advertisement can have known that it had been put there by a Liberal. Many will have taken it at its face value. Facing the photograph of dead dogs was this legend:
When the Government killed the dog licence they left us to kill the dogs. One thousand dogs are killed in Britain every day . . . the Government abolished the licence last year and we are now seeing the consequences.
Anybody who did not know that this advertisement had been placed by an idealistic young Liberal would make va- rious assumptions from it: 1) That the RSPCA now kills 1,000 dogs a day or 365,000 a year, 2) that this slaughter has started only since the dog licence was abolished last year and 3) that this slaugh- ter is the consequence of the Government's abolition of the dog licence.
None of these assumptions would be true; none would bear the smallest re- semblance to the truth. When I telephoned RSPCA headquarters at Horsham, they told me that they had no idea how many dogs the RSPCA slaughtered every day. The figure of 1,000 was estimated as the combined number slaughtered by the RSPCA, the police and other benevolent animal bodies. No figures were available. The last figure the Society has is for 1987, when the RSPCA destroyed 61,615 dogs, or slightly fewer than 170 a day. They had no reason to suppose it had gone up.
Yet suddenly they decide to announce that 1,000 dogs are being killed every day as a result of the Government's abolition of the. 37p dog licence. Every day, I feel, we should thank Heaven, kneeling, that these unpleasant people are unlikely ever to form a government. Goodness knows why it is that people who think they have a good cause feel free to lie or twist in support of it. We see it in public health advertise- ments, more than anywhere else: assuring us that the risk of lung cancer from passive smoking is-both significant and established, when it is neither; more recently we have seen health advertisements which hint that a man's greatest danger of contracting Aids is from ordinary heterosexual intercourse with a woman. This is completely untrue, as well as being insulting to women. WhY do they bother to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to misinform us? It is chiefly in the middle ground or consensus areas of national life that the liars and crooks congregate, I have observed. Just look at the latest Report of the (inter-party) Committee of Public Accounts on Road Safety (HMSO, £4.30). In order to exaggerate the importance of road safety, the Committee has decided that official estimates of the cash cost of road accidents — £3.8 billion in 1987 — were grossly under-estimated, and that 'the estimated cost of £238,000 attached to a road death should be nearer £500,000'. This last statistic is one of the most fatuous and crooked ever produced by a government department as readers may remember when I managed to get the Department of Transport to break it down a few years ago. Apart from a bogus estimate of lost earnings (which are not a cost), the biggest item is for mental anguish. The fact that an inter-party com- mittee chose to up-grade this absurdity shows exactly their mental horizons. Party conflict is often said to reduce the House of Commons to the level of bicker- ing children. My own feeling is that it Is probably the only thing which keeps them remotely adult. The terrifyingly low stan- dard of the new MPs is revealed at its worst when they decide to agree on something — like disapproving of road accidents or cruelty to dogs. That is how the Gavin Grants of this world creep into positions of influence. It is up to the rest of us to keep them out.
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