Middle England's alliance with the malcontents over the misery of veal calves is a protest over its own discontent and powerlessness
My father used to dread taking his children out to feed the calves in their sunless shed. It made us all anxious, that experiment with what was known as "baby beef" 30 years ago.
Father would keep up an uneasy monologue as we mixed the milk powder: "Mind you get the measurements right, or you'll make them ill, just like human babies. I'm not at all sure we should be doing this, it's so unnatural. It may be productivity, but is it progress?"
The calves weren't crated, but they were deprived of grass, light and their mothers, and we fancied we saw reproach in those big brown eyes. My father abandoned the experiment, and so did his friends. They were not what you'd call sentimental men, but they took a dim view of any farmer who ill-treated his animals.
Their anthropomorphism was hierarchical, however, like the animal kingdom itself. Having abandoned veal, many of them went into the other newish sort of factory farming, battery chickens. They were not entirely comfortable with that, either, but a chicken in a sweatshop is easier to look in the eye than a calf, as Spike Milligan found when he sat in a battery cage and squawked for chicken's lib. The public largely ignored him: they, like the farmers, found they could live with improving the productivity of poultry (from 20 eggs per bird to an astonishing 250), even if it meant keeping chickens in conditions worse than veal crates. They still can, which is why 85 per cent of our 34 million chickens live that way.
There is something disturbingly artificial about this veal row that has sent the middle-aged law-abiders out on to the barricades with the yobs and fanatics. It isn't really about veal at all, is it? You can see that something peculiar is going on when you watch encounters between dairy farmers and the sort of normal, sensible townspeople to whom you might entrust your dog while you're away.
The farmer explains that calves are an inescapable by-product of the milk business and asks what he should do with them. "Kill them at birth!" screeches the Middle Englander, that proud standard-bearer of compassion, before going off to give what-for to a lorry driver at Shoreham "who must expect trouble if he gets involved with this dirty trade".
Hey presto, he, or more likely she, is transformed into a campaigner in the mould of the late Andrew Lees, who died of a heart attack while creeping about trying to establish that a mining company's plans for Madagascar were as wicked as he knew they must be. I never met Mr Lees, but I don't like the sound of him from the devastatingly backhanded "tribute" by his former colleague at Friends of the Earth, Jonathon Porritt, that appeared yesterday: He was notable for "principled positions defended beyond compromise and sometimes beyond reason; an aptitude for the tactics of attrition that would have done credit to the Vietcong".
Is this really how they see themselves, these demonstrators-come-lately who keep telling us they never so much as jumped a red light until ten days ago? I fear that, all of a sudden, they do. It is the democratic deficit that has suddenly got to them, and the conductive agent for that electric burst of indignation might just as well have been seals, or pigs, or horses as calves. The issue itself doesn't much matter, so long as it looks simple and generates strong emotion.
As one Edward Lester wrote in a letter to The Observer yesterday, it's a general malaise of powerlessness that links Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells with Bomber of Beaconsfield. "When did government ever respond to the voice of reason and moderation, or the media give extensive coverage to a peaceful demonstration?" he wants to know. "Perhaps we should blame a selfish society that is only jolted out of indifference to misery by sensational action."
That, surely, is the essence of the sort of anthropormorphism we are seeing here. It is not really a question of people looking at a crated calf and saying: "I know how I'd feel if I were in that crate." It is more a matter of people who already feel so powerless and disillusioned with the processes by which their lives are governed, that the sight of the crated calf gives them a sudden jolt of identity. That's how they feel themselves. In taking action, therefore, what they are emphatically not doing is trying to give the animal a life as contented as their own. They are merely lashing out as an expression of their own cratedness.
It may, therefore, be irrelevant that the veal row looks like being soon resolved. We can ignore the reassurances from the mendacious Dutch, who certainly cannot keep their promise to house British calves in groups, because they simply haven't the room. We (and William Waldegrave, the Agriculture Minister) can, however, take comfort from an unexpected quarter; the European Commission has produced a study which claims that banning veal crates and force-feeding of calves would have no appreciable effect on the veal industry's profitability, and more than half the advisers in the Commission's equivalent of an agriculture ministry are now urging a ban on both practices.
So what is next? The fur trade is flourishing again, but this sort of lightning does not strike twice in precisely the same place. Farmers, who worry that intensive lambing may be the next target, could be forgiven for hoping the malcontents' attention will be diverted by a nasty little pamphlet now circulating on how to sabotage construction firms working on the roads programme.
But surely there has to be a more grown-up way of relieving democracy's discontent.
