Blair fails animal test

Tony Blair's has declared that he wants to make a stand in support of animal testing. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Blair announces that he will sign the People's Petition on animal testing, stating that this is 'a sign of just how important I believe it is that as many people as possible stand up against the tiny group of extremists threatening medical research and advances in this country.'

The problem is that the government's record on supporting experimentation is poor. As Josie Appleton points out elsewhere on spiked, the government singularly failed to back the building of a primate research lab in Cambridge, while the Labour Party itself has pulled investments from Huntingdon Life Sciences, a leading testing company. Far from the threat to medical progress coming from a handful of fringe protesters, it is the government itself - and to a degree, the academic and scientific establishment - which has backed away from a proper defence of this important work.

Even now, the government seems to obsess about the threat from a tiny band of anti-social animal activists. What is needed is a change of policy at the highest level that human life is worth more than animals and scientific research using animals is entirely legitimate.

Tony Blair: Time to act against animal rights protesters, Sunday Telegraph, 14 May 2006

Science that dare not speak it's name, by Josie Appleton