Caffe Nero fiddles while cows burn

How bonkers is this? A coffee chain has caved in to intimidation from militant animal rights sentimentalists and is no longer using milk from farms taking part in the badger cull. Caffe Nero’s craven surrender comes after it was threatened on Facebook. All it took was 200 people sharing a page called ‘Stop The Cull’.

Yep, 200. Not 2,000 or two million. They didn’t even have to take to the streets, just ‘like’ something on the internet. we’re not talking Martin Luther King here. The site targeted Caffe Nero outlets for protests during the ‘anti-austerity’ demonstrations planned for London on June 20.

For ‘ anti- austerity’ read ‘ mindless violence’ and ‘punch-ups with the police’. So-called ‘anti-austerity’ marches are football hooliganism for Guardian readers. Yet the mere threat that one of the great unwashed might heave a brick through the front window of a Caffe Nero was enough to force a shameful capitulation from the company’s chairman Gerry Ford.

After receiving an email from two ‘activists’, known only as Steve and Rose, Ford ordered all his pretentious New Age caffs to stop selling milk from west Devon, which is within the zone.

The email asked him where Caffe Nero bought its milk. why did he even bother replying? If he’d ignored it, they’d be none the wiser. Perhaps he thought it was only good manners to write back.

In which case, ‘ Mind your own damn business, you impertinent weasel-faced lunatics’ would have been the appropriate response. Instead, he buckled. Pathetic. Needless to say, badger-botherers were over the moon, Brian. A ‘ campaigner’ called Jay Tiernan said: ‘we now have our first victory against retailers who sell badger cull milk.’

TheRe’S a sentence I never thought I’d write. here’s another one. A leaflet distributed by Stop The Cull reads: ‘Caffe Nero thinks it’s OK to buy milk tainted with badger blood.’ Really? I imagine you’d notice if your skinny latte, or whatever over-priced muck they churn out at Caffe Nero and the like, had a streak of coagulated blood in it.

of course, the rapacious designer coffee chain barons cloak their rampant profiteering in a carapace of corporate responsibility and caring about the ‘ planet’. which i s presumably why Gutless Gerry bottled it.

I’ve never been into a Caffe Nero in my life, though when I was on holiday in California last year I did stop off at a Starbucks to use the toilet and felt it only polite to buy a coffee while I was there.

Basically, as we say in the trade, it was a bucket of froth for a fiver. Rest assured, I won’t be going back. So, in the great scheme of things, I couldn’t care less where Caffe Nero buys its milk. Nor can I understand for the life of me why anyone else would lose any sleep over it, either.

There isn’t room here to go into all the rights and wrongs of the badger cull. Suffice it to say, I’m on the side of the farmers as they build funeral pyres for their infected cattle. Badgers give cows tuberculosis and poison the food chain. how come the badger-botherers never look at this from the cows’ point of view?

Maybe there’s an Animal Farm hierarchy in their demented little minds. Badgers, good. Cows, bad.

Sorry, but give me a prime rib-eye steak over a badger burger any day of the week.

As I wrote recently, an urban badger has been digging up my lawn. I’d cheerfully give him both barrels if I could catch him at it.

Badgers are becoming as much of a menace in North London as mangey foxes and renegade muntjacs. OK, so I live in the green and pleasant Daily Mail bit of London, not the funky inner city Guardianista stomping ground.

But what I simply don’t understand is why anyone existing on marinaded mung beans in a filthy squat in Stoke Newington and idolising the repulsive Russell Brand would give a monkey’s about badgers, above all else.

Anybody who can get so worked up about badgers to the point of tracking down the sources of milk used i n coffee bars should be sectioned, under the Mental health Act, and confined to a rubber room in a jacket that buttons up at the back.

They don’t, of course. Give a monkey’s about badgers, that is. Badgers are just another excuse for a barney.

This week, it’s badgers. Last week, it was Palestine. Next week, it’s ‘anti-austerity’. And coming back in July, by unpopular demand, they’ll be smashing windows and beating up WPCS on behalf of ‘anti-globalisation’.

These are the same scumbags and soap- dodgers who defaced the women in war memorial in whitehall a couple of weeks ago.

having humbled Caffe Nero, the badger-botherers are moving on to rough up Sainsbury’s.

OF COURSE they are. That’s what ‘activists’ do. how the heart sinks whenever t he BBC wheels out someone described as a ‘blogger and activist’, like the absurd painted lady and ‘food activist’ Jolly Jack Monroe, of kale pesto pasta fame.

You don’t need to actually listen to them. I can tell you what they think about absolutely everything, from the eu and Israel to global warming and Guantanamo Bay.

They are so depressingly predictable. Their lives must be emptier than the Greek Treasury.

For instance, last week a team of madwomen called PETA — or was it Petra, after the Blue Peter dog? — launched a campaign to change the name of Britain’s oldest pub, in St Albans, hertfordshire, from Ye olde Fighting Cocks to Ye olde Clever Cocks in recognition of ‘compassion for animals’.

Most people of sound mind would stumble across Ye olde Fighting Cocks and think: ‘I could murder a pint.’ Not the Looby Loo brigade. Their first instinct is to launch a campaign to change the name. Nurse! Come to think of it, I could murder a coffee right now. Make it a treble espresso with extra badger’s blood.