If your opponents are resorting to Tea party tactics to hound you,reasoned argument won’t aid win the dayIt’s a “sinister and nasty” organisation, one that “hounds” the innocent and “bullies and threatens” the innocent, or according to one critic. And final 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, or 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, and 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.
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Source: theguardian.com