The debate is over and – thanks to an unusual use of a statutory Instrument (SI) – the Public Order Act 2023 will make peaceful protest against animal testing facilities a criminal offence.
With this amendment, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has further quashed free speech, making it clear that it’s uninterested in public opinion or the horrors animals endure.
The move is as baffling as it is concerning, given the government’s recent commitment to replacing cruel animal testing with animal-free methods.
Freedom
Where, exactly, along the trajectory toward scientifically superior, humane methods does gagging those speaking up against animal abuse fit?
This law, which will obscure the public’s already murky view of how the government props up this secretive industry, is entirely at odds with the government’s strategy.
Unsurprisingly, it has faced fierce opposition within government ranks, with more than two dozen Labour MPs rebelling against the plan, highlighting widespread unease about the amendment’s lack of scrutiny.
There’s a reason this law change has been labelled “sneaky”. While SIs are routinely used to make technical or administrative tweaks to laws, this use represents a major overhaul of protest laws to an extent that many agree warrants a new act of parliament.
What’s more, the Public Order Act already presents well-documented risks to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, making this sweeping extension of these powers unnecessary.
Lives
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised this amendment has been ‘backdoored’. Experiments on animals are, after all, shrouded in secrecy.
The Home Office does release an annual report – the latest of which revealed that 2.64 million procedures were conducted on animals in Great Britain in 2024. But animals used for their body parts or trapped in the breeding supply chain are not included in government figures.
To add to the opacity, inspections – and the details behind serious violations – are not made public. Statistics hide the most painful procedures, and vague terms, such as “humane endpoints”, tell us little about how animals really suffer.
Unknown to most, also, is the lack of sound scientific solutions that experiments on animals deliver.
Take sepsis research, for example. Sepsis claims the lives of 48,000 British people each year – more than the toll taken by breast, bowel and prostate cancer combined.
Exploited
Yet research continues to rely primarily on mice, even though all sepsis treatments developed using mice have failed in humans.
Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins once referred to useless animal studies for sepsis as a “heartbreaking loss of decades of research and billions of dollars”.