ARR believe the future belongs to them

I HAVE a word of advice for those members of the farming community who still believe they’re living in the present. They are not, they are already living in the past.

Because the future has already arrived and the people who will be running it are already among us. And they are not only making their views felt but are committed to imposing their beliefs and their creeds on everyone else. So everyone else had better get ready for it.

Who are the new masters of the world? Why the members of Animal Rights Rebellion (ARR) who appeared on TV this week – and naturally the BBC, given the tastes and tendencies of so many who work for it, would be only too happy to provide the airtime – to launch their latest campaign.

Which is to ban any form of meat from being served in school meals across Wales for a minimum of two days a week. Neither, as the ARR spokesman (who himself appeared to have left school only last year) stressed, was this merely going to amount to a demand.

No stone would be left unturned, no buttocks left unglued to a bridge, in short no possible means of persuasion or coercion would be discounted in order to achieve the aim.

Naturally, no one has consulted the children who actually eat the meals about this. No one has asked them if they mind eating highly-processed vegetarian meat substitutes.

No one has asked them if they care that the soy protein that is the basis for so many such products has only been obtained by massive deforestation in the Americas. Or that that, together with the environmental cost of its manufacture, gives it one of the biggest carbon footprints of any foodstuff.

No, no one has even thought to sound out the end users. Because there is only one true path and that is the one ARR is treading.

Of course, it remains to be seen how far they are prepared to go in order to force the local education authorities to impose this regime. And, indeed, how much resistance the councils will put up.

But when I am contacted by a desperate local authority official for advice on how to counter the threat and am told at least six of his councillors already seem to think two meat-free days not to be such a bad idea I fear there will be less opposition than we could hope for.

But then we are yesterday’s people. According to ARR the future belongs to them. They want it to work to their advantage and for their benefit and according to their system of beliefs. And the changes to facilitate all that have to happen now. Actually I think I’ll stay in the present – even if that means that in their terms I am actually in the past. I mean, the present has its drawbacks. Life is far from perfect. There are many things that need changing for the better.

But at least I am not forced to live my life according to the code of a minority, single-interest group spouting meaningless propaganda on a subject about which they have clearly obtained a deep and farreaching understanding thanks to all the pointless blather they have read about it on social media.

Actually I think I’ll stay in the present – even if that means that in their terms I am actually in the past