SPONSORED: ‘Why Burnham’s Labour gives animals reason to ‘hope again’

SPONSORED

‘Would you like a photo with Larry the cat?’ was not the question delegates expected on arrival at Labour’s party conference in Liverpool last week, but it was one that elicited a lot of big smiles! Our six-foot high Larry enabled hundreds of people, including dozens of MPs, to join in furry solidarity with Larry’s plea on X to ‘Please leave fur wearing to the professionals… fur is for animals’, in support of our campaign for an end to the UK fur trade.

Those smiles said something important. Animals don’t have votes, but they have millions of people who love and respect them, and those people vote.

That respect is why a Labour Government made Britain the first country in the world to ban fur farming over 20 years ago. But the job was only half done. Every year we still import fur from foxes, mink and raccoon dogs who spend their entire short lives tormented in barren wire cages until the day they are gassed or electrocuted to become a coat trim or a bobble hat. Almost 80% of the public and over 200 MPs want us to stop offshoring this cruelty, by ending the UK fur trade. At the upcoming EU-UK Summit the UK must hold on to our right to stop trading in fur and other products that don’t meet our animal welfare standards. Complex as they are, deliberations over our future relationship with the EU must not be a reason to lose commitments to animal welfare in the long grass.

Andy Burnham’s speech to conference was infused with compassion. He spoke about human suffering not as a statistic but as something a decent state should step in to stop. He promised ‘hope again’ that the Government will act to protect vulnerable members of society and challenge powerful interests when they profit at the expense of others. These are exactly the values that animals need in Westminster.

The government’s Animal Welfare Strategy already sets this direction: “our vision is clear and uncompromising: every animal will experience positive welfare throughout their life” and promises a plethora of hugely popular measures to crack down on cruelty and increase protections for animals. So it was disappointing for it not to feature in Dame Angela’s speech to conference, and jarring that her only mention of animals were the chickens in the ‘poultry sector growth plan’.

Picture what that plan really means: more birds bred to grow so fast that they collapse under their own weight, to be burned by their own waste. Then picture where their waste goes, into the very rivers the government is rightly determined to clean up. The government is calling time on water companies that put profit before people. It should ask the same hard questions of an intensive livestock industry, propped up by public money, that is quietly externalising true costs on the environment, animals, climate and communities.

The Prime Minister said he wants a Britain confident of its place in the world, a country confident in its values and prepared to live by them. The values that animated this conference are the same values that can and should deliver transformative progress for animals, starting with delivery of animal protection manifesto commitments: banning snares, strengthening the law to properly ban hunting with dogs, and ending imports of hunting trophies. All three belong in the next parliamentary session. Burnham spoke of building cross-party alliances to make change; on these measures he will find support from right across the political spectrum.

At Humane World for Animals’ stand throughout conference we spoke to Ministers, MPs, MSPs, councillors and members who want Labour’s values to benefit animals. For mother pigs not to be kept behind bars or cruelly gassed to death; for our trading relationship with the rest of theworld to protect our welfare standards; for our wildlife to be able to thrive without brutal and senseless persecution, and so much more.

So we left this conference with hope that Andy Burnham’s direction for Labour will see his government’s compassion extended to the billions of sentient beings who can’t campaign, can’t lobby and can’t turn up to conference (except, occasionally, as a six-foot cat).

As we approach the first anniversary of the Government’s Animal Welfare Strategy, we recognise Defra’s preparatory work to deliver vital improvements for chickens, lambs, foxes, deer, dogs, cats and many more animals. But, as Dame Angela Eagle recognised at a live recording of The Rundown podcast, obsessional consultations can easily cause progress paralysis. So we encourage MPs to table questions and speak in Parliament to hold her to her pledge to ‘get the barnacles off the boat and get it out of the harbour’, and to make sure 2027 is the year Labour’s animal welfare promises move from strategy into action.

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