NEWS and OPINION: I have been digging around to see how Liz Truss, the new PM, squares up in respect of animal welfare. It is a topic which is incredibly important to me, and progress was made under Boris Johnson to improve animal welfare thanks to the presence of his wife Carrie.
Lord Goldsmith is a buddy of Carrie Johnson, and he was given the task to progress animal welfare in the UK, but he was removed from the cabinet by Liz Truss. He’s been sacked as an environment minister. The sacking indicates a disregard by Liz Truss for animal welfare issues.
When Elizabeth Truss was environment secretary, she apparently gave her full-throated support for overturning the foxhunting ban. And yet, as the environment secretary she must have had some understanding of animal sentence and the innate cruelty of foxhunting. And now, as the Prime Minister, she is preparing to trash a progressive environmental protection policy on the high altar of capitalist economic growth. She prioritises economic growth over everything, and it is certainly far more important to her than protecting the environment. This is made symbolic in her demand that King Charles III does not attend Cop 27. He wanted to attend to give a speech and now he has agreed not to attend in person. He may attend via video link.
People are questioning why the Prime Minister told King Charles not to attend. It sends a very bad signal to the world. And attempts at controlling global warming are going to fizzle out under her unless she is removed, I predict that she will be removed before the next general election.
My impression is that Liz Truss is so overwhelmingly concerned with the free market and economic growth that she wants to remove any possible obstacle to pleasing those people who she believes will drive economic growth which means the upper classes living in the countryside as one group and these are the foxhunters. She wants to please foxhunters.
It is along the same lines of her speedy declaration through her Chancellor of the Exchequer to remove the upper tier of income tax which will make wealthy people wealthier. She believes in trickle-down economics. If the rich are wealthier, the poor will also be wealthier. That’s the theory, but most economists don’t believe it works. I guess the rich just keep the money which makes sense, and it is what I see.
The Independent newspaper reports that Liz Truss “has a funny relationship with animals”. She is said to be a cat lover because she believes that Larry the Cat, the resident cat at number 10 Downing Street, preferred her to other cabinet ministers when she was in the cabinet and before she became Prime Minister.
That’s quite amusing because often domestic cats tend to go towards people who hate cats! There is a theory about that which states that people who don’t like cats don’t want to look at cats when they enter the room and they become more passive and retiring. This makes them less threatening to a cat when they are among strangers. Those who like cat tend to wave their arms around and try and engage with the cat which can be off-putting. I think she is delusional in her belief that cats like her.
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And the impression is that Liz Truss is not an animal lover. The Independent newspaper has a headline which tells us that she is “about to embark on the greatest betrayal of animal rights imaginable”.
Party insiders believe that she is about to axe the Kept Animals Bill. It’s a bill which bans primates as pets. It tackles puppy smuggling and helps to protect livestock from dangerous dogs. It also bans live exports. Live export of animals from Britain to continental Europe is a major concern for animal welfare advocates.
In 2019 at least 6,000 animals were exported this way, suffering unimaginably throughout the journey to be slaughtered at the end of it. Boris Johnson, the then Prime Minister spoke out against live exports. Brexit allowed him to introduce laws which ban it.
But now, this protection of livestock look set to be removed in the interests of economic growth and free market capitalism.
The Kept Animals Bill is yet to be enacted i.e., become law but it is probably only days or weeks away from becoming an act of Parliament. It was going to be debated in Parliament, but the Queen’s funeral intervened, and it is said that the new Prime Minister will not follow through on this bill. It will die.
A live export ban was promised in the Tory manifesto as part of the Conservative party’s animal welfare action plan. If this bill is scrapped it will be a breach of trust and symbolic of the attitude of this dysfunctional government which has lurched from sloppiness under Boris Johnson to craziness under Liz Truss.
I’m told that when she was Foreign Secretary, she negotiated trade deals which funded animal cruelty and practices which would be illegal in the UK. And rather than promoting the UK becoming more self-sufficient in food she agreed to financing systems that you supported 48-hour transport of livestock, battery cages and sow stalls.
It looks like inside information tells us that new Prime Minister is not really interested in animal welfare and will sacrifice any progress on it in the interests of the rush for economic growth. Economic growth across the planet is the greatest barrier to improve animal welfare and the greatest barrier to conservation of wild species. It results inevitably in the destruction of the wild habitat, primarily forests in which millions of species live in which depend upon the forest for sustenance.
Update October 5th, 2022: Well, there is more bad news for nature and animal lovers. This disreputable and dysfunctional government headed by Liz Truss who couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery has plans to allow housing developers to, in effect, ignore regulations protecting nature. Some ministers, countryside, environment and heritage groups see the government attacking nature in Truss’s chase for economic growth at any cost a big mistake.
Prime Minister Truss’ plans to revive fracking in the UK should ring alarm bells for our planet. This will harm nature too.
Truss wants investment zones. But this will destroy the habitat of native animals for the sake of economic growth which is why Africa’s wildlife is f***k*d. Truss is insensitive to animal welfare. For me, she has to go, and I hope that she will be forced out by Christmas.
Update October 16: happy news for everyone almost. Liz Truss is on the way out. The Tory party elders are circling and plotting to get rid of her as soon as possible because they want to keep their jobs at the next election. She’s brought the party down to the point where they are certain to lose the next election in two years’ time. Can they remove her quickly enough to turn what is a nightmare into a fading bad dream at the time of the next election? These are extraordinary times as the commentators say and the Prime Minister has to go as soon as possible in order for us to keep our sanity, to stabilise the country’s finances and, from my perspective, to go back to what Boris Johnson injected into the government which was a concern for animal welfare and wildlife. That was thanks to Carrie Johnson and his wife.
Update Oct 20, 2022: as you probably know she has resigned. The shortest tenure of a British PM ever in the history of the country. The job was beyond her capabilities. No question about it. Let’s hope that the incoming PM retains animal welfare on the agenda and that the dire state of the UK’s finances does not deter them from that task.
Below are some more articles on animal laws.
