Chris Worfolk's Blog

On April 10th, I wrote to all my local MEPs, asking them to support legislation in the European parliament which would require all meat to be clearly labelled as to whether it was slaughtered by humane of religious methods.

If you aren’t aware of the background, animals slaughtered in the UK must be done do by first pre-stunning the animal to make it unconscious before you kill it. However, Islamic and Jewish communities have an exemption from this law which allows them to slaughter the animal while still fully conscious by slitting their throat and then leaving them to slowly bleed to death as they thrash around in pain. It’s pretty horrific, which is why the governments advisory board, the Farm Animal Welfare Council, advised the exemption should be removed immediately.

What is worse however, is that many restaurants and shops, including high street supermarkets, often sell Halal meat as regular meat, without any labeling – you could be eating meat from an animal that was unethically slaughtered and not even know it.

While the ultimate solution is to remove this exception, which would be the fair thing to do in our modern secular society – we’re not asking for anything special, just that the law by applied to us all equally without the current discrimination that happens, at the very least it should be a requirement to label meat as having come from religious slaughter, so that those of us with an ethical conscience, can choose to avoid it.

Only three of the MEPs I wrote to responded, here is what they said:

Timothy Kirkhope MEP from the Conservatives told me that his colleague, which sits on the ENVI committee was doing everything possible to support this legislation, stressing that his concern was animal welfare and allowing consumers to make an informed choice.

Godfrey Bloom MEP from UKIP told me that he opposed the legislation because he didn’t support any legislation that came from Europe and therefore detracted from our sovereign power. From what I can work out, it seems UKIP candidates just sit in the European Parliament and cheer at the entire proceedings. Still, that is probably what the electorate want them to do.

Linda McAvan MEP from Labour told me that she supported legislation that required meat to be properly labelled and had voted for this before – but would not be voting on this one because they didn’t feel it was appropriate (nothing to do with it having been proposed by a Conservative of course).

She also said it was important that religious slaughter, while it should be properly labelled, should be allowed to continue. I replied to her on this, challenging the idea of religious privilege over applying the law fairly and consistently to all. She responded, saying that the views of the Muslim and Jewish communities took precedence but also said that while the exemption exists, 80-90% of religiously slaughtered animals were actually pre-stunned.

On Thursday May 5th, I voted yes to the alternative vote.

Not strictly because I actually wanted the alternative vote, but because the no campaign had been so shocking immoral. If it wasn’t massively exaggerating the cost of implementing AV by including the cost of the referendum (which thanks to the no campaign we still had to pay for even though nothing has changed) it was billboards with messages like “she needs a maternity ward, not an alternative vote.” As soon as that slogan was released, they should have lost the argument on something equivalent to Godwin’s Law.

Not to mention that most of the no campaign has been based on complete lies. Their website scare mongers with claims AV would elect the BNP even though under AV it would actually be more difficult for the BNP to get elected. They trick people by saying almost nobody uses AV even though many countries use even more progressive systems than AV.

Clearly there is something very much wrong with the morality lf those on the side of the no campaign. Even before you discover the BNP are opposed to AV as well.

Some people would argue that simply not liking one side of the argument isn’t a good enough reason to vote for the other. Unfortunately, we weren’t provided with much else to make the decision on.

The yes campaign was appalling. I got a flyer taking about “more of the same” and fat cat MPs getting expenses and still to this day it remains a mystery as to how these could be considered arguments for AV. Dan Snow’s video was excellent but I only watched it a few days after the referendum which leads me to believe that most people didn’t see it at all.

The yes campaign simply failed to convince people that AV was a good idea.

The second problem, is that the yes campaign simply doesn’t have that strong an argument. First past the post is a good system, it means the person with the most votes wins. While it does mean that less than 50% of people vote for the chosen candidate that less people wanted to elect that another candidate. AV, on balance, probably is a better system. But only just.

Which leads me on to my other reason for voting for AV. Ultimately, it’s a step forward to a more progressive system of voting. If we ever do want to move to a more proportional representation system, this would have been a good stepping stone. Not to mention that if it did turn out to be a rubbish system in reality, we could just change it back. That’s the great thing about trying new things. But alas, it’s not to be.

Despite many people taking advantage of the four day weekend around May Day and going away, we decided to go ahead with May’s meeting of Humanist Community.

Turn out turned out to be higher than expected and interestingly, we even had a predominantly young audience with over half the people attending being under 30! Discussions were enjoyable, though not particularly heated – when we discussed the royal wedding, everyone just agreed. Great minds and all that I guess 😀 .

On Sunday, there was a trade union march through Leeds city centre.

While the front of the march seemed quite sensible, there point was somewhat undermined by the back of the procession with parties around Revolution just yelling obscenities through a megaphone rather than making any kind of serious political point.

Last Sunday, we headed down to Distrikt for some Sunday lunch.

Rich always gets great service in there as it turns out he has been unknowingly masquerading as an Observer food critic. You have to wonder whether an Observer food critic would actually walk in with a copy of the Observer, but there you go.

Never the less he played up to the roll and recommended the lamb to us, which he said was excellent when he had had it last week 😉 . The dessert was good too though they clearly haven’t taken on our heartfelt suggestions from last time that they needed more chocolate based options.

The Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge is a circular walk of 39.2km (24.5 miles) round the peaks of the Yorkshire Dales – Whernside (736 m/2,415 ft), Ingleborough (723 m/2,372 ft) and Pen-y-ghent (694 m/2,277 ft).

All this and only twelve hours to do it in – are you up for the challenge?

Join us for this fun day taking in some amazing scenery in the Yorkshire Dales, and raise money for charity at the same time! The event is taking place Saturday 23 July 2011. For further details see the Facebook event or email us.

Got up on Sunday morning to find George has been busy snapping away the night before.

Having another four day weekend in hand, we decided to throw a last minute soirée on Saturday. Norm did a fantastic job throwing a dinner together and once you throw in some Doctor Who and a few cocktails, you have yourself a winning evening.

The second book on my list was Terry Pratchett’s Nation. As I’m sure most of you are ware, Pratchett is an amazing writer, though I haven’t actually read one of his books since my childhood.

The novel follows the story of Mau, a child currently going through the initiation ceremony of his culture into becoming a man, only to find out that a great wave has wiped out his civilization. It is therefore placed on his shoulders to re-build The Nation.

Recently, Pratchett has made more of his status as a humanist, in no small part due to the number of religious scumbags who fight against the use of stem cell research in medical research to cure debilitating illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, of which Pratchett is suffering from. This is very evident in the novel – it’s not anti-religious, but it makes the point, very elegantly, that religion is a human creation.

I found it a bit low level, though I think it’s technically a children’s novel, but very enjoyable none the less.

Since getting my iPad last month, and installing Kindle on it, I’ve gone back to reading some fiction. Not actually on the iPad, but it never the less seems to have inspired me.

Given the number of references I seemed to keep missing, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed a good choice to start with and I found myself soon engrossed in the book. The plot, for those not familiar with it, looks at a dystopian totalitarian future in which The Party maintains total controls, not only over their subject’s actions, but also their thoughts.

It’s often used as the yardstick against which real-world regimes are measured, especially in today’s surveillance society which seems ever more encroaching and yet it definitely still a long distance away from the telescreens installed in every party member’s home, allowing the Thought Police to listen in to your home at any time, as presented in Orwell’s novel.

The book has quickly risen to one of my favourite novels of all time. For some reason, it seems to invoke a sense that despite malevolent efforts, true love can survive, even though in the novel itself, it actually doesn’t. Still, life would be boring if everything had a happy ending ;).