It’s a “sinister and nasty” organisation, one that “hounds” the innocent and “bullies and threatens” the blameless, according to one critic. And last week Neil Parish, chairman of a new Commons committee, announced an official investigation into the “balance” of its activities. Which evil organisation could this be?
It’s the RSPCA, and the issue is the balance struck between animal welfare and campaigning. These interests are actually harmonious: if you are interested in animal welfare and you see a group persistently undermining it, whether that’s illegal foxhunters or the shooting fraternity doing the dirty on hen harriers, then you campaign against them. Not only are these interests precisely balanced, each would be neutered without the other. But the battle between the Countryside Alliance and the RSPCA is a near-perfect study of the way conservatives and progressives fight each other – reason is rarely the defining feature of this landscape, and often doesn’t disturb it at all.
Conservative arguments are unashamed of overstatement. The real behaviour underneath that “sinister and nasty” charge – levelled by the former executive chairman of the Countryside Alliance, Barney White-Spunner – was a series of prosecutions the RSPCA launched against illegal hunts. The charge was that they are spending money donated in good faith to help animals on expensive legal cases.
There’s a debate to be had: should any charity spend any money on bringing cases to court, unless that’s the express purpose of their fundraising? What’s the point of an animal welfare organisation that has no mandate to stop people psychotically mistreating animals? That debate would raise questions around the statutory powers of non-state bodies, around what “charity” means in this post-lobbying act era, and indeed, what “political” means, attached (always as an insult) to the third sector, and whether it’s possible to care deeply about anything while maintaining the neutrality expected from the upstanding member of the voluntary world.
What that debate would never, in sensible minds, become is a fight about who was sinister and who was nasty. Such hyperbole makes White-Spunner look ridiculous under scrutiny – and yet, in the absence of scrutiny, it just creates a cloud of suspicion around the RSPCA. It’s a technique borrowed from the US Tea party movement – possibly its most elegant iteration was Sarah Palin describing Obamacare as “Barack Obama’s death panel” – working on the basis that if you can leave a bad impression of your opponents on people who aren’t concentrating, this will cause them more reputational damage than you will suffer yourself from the opprobrium of those who are paying attention.
It’s maths, innit: more people don’t concentrate on foxhunting than do; or driven grouse shoots, or disabled rabbits. Most people are quite busy. The progressive side, by contrast, has an aversion to overstatement and will respond to even the most unreasonable attacks in quite bland, wonkish terms.
The RSPCA’s statement regarding the legal cases they had brought ran thus: “The figures cited by the Countryside Alliance are disingenuous. It is a gross distortion to compare a percentage calculated on the number of summonses with a percentage calculated on the number of individual defendants successfully convicted.” What they should have said is “this is a foolish accusation, made by people whose idea of fun is to violently kill things”. Yet they cannot. Progressives rely a huge amount, for their self-belief and self-fashioning, on the idea that they are reasonable, sober people, who are able to listen to their opposites and reach meaningful and mature compromises. This works with other progressives, which is why people who outwardly hold the same views can have such intense conversations uncovering their differences; it doesn’t work at all on the Countryside Alliance.
After the overstatement, from the forces ranged against the RSPCA, comes the giddy departure from the requirements of reason: a story last week in the Sunday Times attacked the charity for bullying and threatening, citing examples in which people had been accused of animal cruelty and the charge had turned out to be without foundation. There was one poignant and bizarre case involving some disabled rabbits adopted by a woman precisely because they were disabled, then destroyed by an RSPCA vet who deemed their quality of life to be too low. It read like a difference of opinion about leporine quality of life between two people who desperately loved rabbits – in the event of which, I’d go with the one with the veterinary qualifications (but I’m a progressive, I would say that).
But if the RSPCA never got it wrong, if they never brought a case against anybody who wasn’t guilty, they would only partially be doing their job. If every defendant who arrived in court were guilty, you’d either be living in North Korea or you’d have a system that missed a lot of people who were also guilty. This story would never have stood up without the steady buildup of accusations; if the RSPCA didn’t now have a reputation for radical campaigning, promiscuous legal actions and the underhand use of funds, the fact that they overreacted to an unkempt cat would be seen as the minor human error that it was. I doubt it would have even made the local newspaper of the cat’s own postcode.
The conservative technique, in short, is this: the first priority is to damage one’s opponent’s reputation, way ahead of maintaining one’s own. Once this damage has been done, deploy previous overstatements as matters of settled fact, so that your opponent is shunted ever further from what a casual observer would class as common sense. Crucially, never let up.
The progressive technique is the opposite: maintain your respectability with careful, rather supercilious reasoning, then wonder why you’re taking all the blows. Neither has got it right, but one is plainly winning.