Beware Greens bearing gifts
Tweet
I don’t vote Green. However, I had thought the Green Party was probably OK, maybe amiable hippies at the worst, worthy in their narrow focus but peripheral in the grander scheme of things. However, a policy document on their website made me sit up. It’s on Animal Rights. Mostly, the content is as one would expect, and indeed, as one would hope. Except for this:
AR407 The Green Party is opposed, on scientific and ethical grounds, to the harmful use of animals in research and for medical purposes and would ban all research and medical practice which harms animals, including harmful procedures used to obtain animal derived materials. 'Harmful' is defined in this context as 'having the potential to cause pain, suffering, distress, lasting harm or death in animals, except where it is designed to benefit the individual animals concerned'. Government research funds will be transferred from animal tests to superior nonanimal technologies, including epidemiology, computer models, micro-dosing, DNA chips, Microfluidics chips and the use of human tissue. Greens would also fund more research into prevention of disease, looking at diet, environment, family history and lifestyle.
If they ban all animal research I wonder of they've noticed they’re picking a fight with most medical cancer charities and several thousand marathon runners? And all those women with breast cancer etc. I wonder what the Association of Medical Research Charities thinks? Or indeed the 2 million people currently surviving with cancer – especially the two thirds of whom have no family history or lifestyle explanations for their diagnosis. I bet all the asthmatics would love to know how the Greens propose scientists can study 'cough' in anything other than a whole system. I nursed the UK’s first children to have liver transplants. I’m glad I didn’t have to explain to a mum and dad that we couldn’t help their child as there were more pressing concerns about the outcomes for the pigs on whom the first test transplants were done……
Where do they get their scientific advice from? Spinning a bottle? They like the orthodoxy of the science of climate change and don’t have space for the ‘sceptics’. But they don’t like the orthodoxy of medicine, which supports with regret, animal testing. I prefer evidence based policy but their policy looks 'belief' based.....
However, I don't have to worry. Nothing much has actually changed now I have noticed this policy document. I still don't like animal testing, but it is a reasonable way forward with current knowledge. I don’t vote Green but now I think the Green Party are flakes, worthy in much of their narrow focus but, thankfully, still entirely peripheral in the grander scheme of things.
