What do our Political Parties think about factory farming?

With many big retailers (namely Tesco and Asda), and virtually the whole of the catering industry failing dismally to make substantial improvements to animal welfare by committing to higher standards for standard poultry, will legislators do anything to help animals? To know that, we need to know what the three main Political Parties believe.

Labour

New Labour came to power in 1997 with good intentions on animal welfare. They stated that:

"Labour will place a new emphasis on improved husbandry, and less intensive production". 

They have now had nearly 12 years to implement these good intentions, but unfortunately they have almost universally failed. While I continually try to get information from Ministers on where they think the future will take us, it is like trying to get blood from a stone.

Instead, one receives endless monotonous letters from the ominous sounding 'Central Communications Unit' at defra which give no revealing insight, and unfortunately often try to defend factory farming. 

Update (9-2-09): On re-reading this, I thought it left too negative an impression. Labour clearly retain good intentions on this issue, and they have pushed for multilateral action at a European level, as well as acting unilaterally in Britain by, for example, banning sow stalls. Yet one can't escape the fact they have been in power for 12 years, and in many respects things have got worse.

Liberal Democrats

I have to declare an interest here as a member of the Lib Dems, but I promise I am trying to be objective, as to an extent this is an issue that transcends UK party politics.

However the Lib Dems do have clear policies to improve the welfare of farm animals. There is plenty of stuff around on the web in terms of Lib Dem policy on this area, such as this from Lib Dem Europe Leader, Graham Watson MEP.

Also, below is a letter from Chris Huhne MP from the time when he was Lib Dem shadow Environment Secretary in which he sets out his views.

Conservatives

Unfortunately this section is going to be short because I can find no evidence on the web of any Conservative policy on factory farming, or any examples of Conservative elected representatives' views. I did write to the Shadow Environment Secretary, Peter Ainsworth MP on the 9th December 2008, and have received only an acknowledgement of receipt of my email, but as yet no reply. I will of course post it if/when I receive it.

A Cabinet of chickens?

Yesterday I sent this letter to all 24 members of the Cabinet. Recent attempts at getting answers and opinions from our leaders on this have been distinctly unsuccessful, and this attempt will probably be the same. Nevertheless, as and when I receive responses over the next few weeks, I will post them on here for all to see!

The humble chicken

The world is getting smaller, populations are getting larger, developed countries eat too much meat, and substantial corporate ethical policies are few and far between. 

These are some of the main reasons that most of the chickens and pigs we eat today are products of modern intensive factory farming. As a nation, and as a world, we have to decide where we want to go now, and there are only two options. We either continue on the slippery slope of increasingly intensive farming, driven by price wars on the flesh of living creatures by retailers. Or we make a conscious decision to do the opposite, and drag ourselves out of the furious cycle of farming intensivation of recent decades.

The former is the easy option, the latter is difficult one. And it will be a difficult one. It requires sacrifice on behalf of the Consumer and the Corporations, a concept which is rarely popular.

But if Gandhi was right when he said that"[t]he greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated" then we've a long way to go if we want to be great again.