Just a few words about the recent agreement by MPs to introduce a ban on wild animals in circuses.
It's an excellent motion: it isn't binding, it isn't an 'immediate possibility' (in the words of Ministers who tried to scupper it, despite its being backed by parliamentary and public opinion) and it isn't going to happen until after the outcome of a legal challenge to a similar ban in Austria has been decided.
The official reason for the government holding back on the ban, preferring to mumble about the possibility of reinforcing existing laws, is that a ban might infringe the rights of circus owners under European Law, though as Allegra Stratton points out, the European Commission does allow individual members to make exceptions on animal welfare grounds.
Mary Creagh, Shadow Environment Secretary, described the government's handling of the motion as 'confused.' This presumably refers to the botched three-line whip that the Conservatives put out against voting in favour of the ban, and to their policy of acknowledging the obligation laid on them to take action while persisting in their obvious unwillingness to do so. It could be said that their sympathies lie with entrepreneurial circus-owners (and the performing animal company in Cameron's constituency) but it seems to me this is typical of the way the Tories tread water over animal welfare issues, in a way that ultimately does no good to man or beast.
Take their handling of the impending badger cull, which Caroline Spelman is 'strongly minded' to back. If the current government had shown more strength of mind they might be offering to deliver on the previous government's promise of an oral vaccine for badgers by 2015. This solution would be more reliably effective than the hugely expensive culls (likely to cost in the region of £92 million), which carry with them the risk if not likelihood of perturbation (whereby TB escalates in areas surrounding the culling hotspots). The government seems to have put the kibosh on vaccination, and is apparently committed to frustrating progress in animal welfare whenever it can.
The Conservatives' behaviour over the circus issue seems particularly characteristic because the preservation of old-style circuses fits in with the Enid Blytonesque aesthetic of Cameron's fantastical Big Society, where we all head down to the Big Top for some big laughs. Never mind a bit of entrenched cruelty or injustice, it's all in good fun.
Notably the embarrassingly chippy Tory MP Mark Pritchard - a self-described 'little council-house lad' and leader of the Parliamentary campaign for the ban - does not have a place in this vision.
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