Growing strong - causes which took root years ago can change the world
"First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you." --- Tony Benn
IT was 175 years ago this week that a small group of Victorians set-up the Vegetarian Society to promote meat-free diets.
This might perhaps surprise you in a society where most men and no women had the vote, where the workhouse was a fact of life and slavery had only been abolished some 15 years earlier.
Today, official estimates suggest one in ten Britons - more than six million people nationwide - follow a vegetarian diet.
Obviously this means that a clear majority do not, a fact that shouldn't be forgotten by those who have chosen to make the switch.
But it's obviously equally nonsense to treat meat-free diets as either new or niche - this is a growing constituency of the population, feeding a multi-billion pound industry of plant-free produce.
These are facts that clearly escaped senior Tories who convened for their annual conference this week.
Meeting in Manchester, the same city which once nurtured the country's nascent vegetarian movement, there was no shortage of cabinet ministers quick to put the boot into their latest bete noire.
Having recently tried to make political capital out of saving the nation from a meat tax which had no chance of happening, the frontbenchers tried to fuel the fires further with obvious pot-shots at vegetarianism more generally.
Environment Secretary Therese Coffey sneered that meat substitutes - seen as an important tool in fighting climate change - were good for astronauts but no-one else.
Another minister, Claire Coutinho - who actually holds the Net Zero brief - suggested that Keir Starmer's enthusiasm for taxing your sausages (the utterly fictitious policy mentioned above) was only to be expected from someone who'd sworn off the bangers himself.
Their rather juvenile sniping is pretty pathetic, not least because the simple maths that their boss, Rishi Sunak, always tells us is so important makes clear that there is no credible path to Net Zero which doesn't involve cutting greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
That doesn't have to be a tax incidentally, but it could mean nudge tactics or public information campaigns about the health and environmental benefits of eating less meat.
Instead right-wingers would rather position themselves as the last bastion against the moral squeamishness which is corrupting kids and infecting institutions and if that means full blown war against the "tofu-eating wokerati" - the words of the always loveable Suella Braverman - so be it.
Rather depressingly I'd prefer a much more grown-up approach to this debate. As a vegetarian since the age of seven it is something I care passionately about, but it's also an issue where I've tried to combine conviction with conciliation.
I was the only vegetarian I knew until my early teens and perhaps this taught me the value of consensus building. I would defend my beliefs firmly when I felt someone was mocking them, but I was never an evangelist. So much so I've often felt that should I ever have children I would be unlikely to raise them veggie at least until an age when they could unequivocally choose this path themselves.
This might perhaps surprise you in a society where most men and no women had the vote, where the workhouse was a fact of life and slavery had only been abolished some 15 years earlier.
Today, official estimates suggest one in ten Britons - more than six million people nationwide - follow a vegetarian diet.
Obviously this means that a clear majority do not, a fact that shouldn't be forgotten by those who have chosen to make the switch.
But it's obviously equally nonsense to treat meat-free diets as either new or niche - this is a growing constituency of the population, feeding a multi-billion pound industry of plant-free produce.
These are facts that clearly escaped senior Tories who convened for their annual conference this week.
Meeting in Manchester, the same city which once nurtured the country's nascent vegetarian movement, there was no shortage of cabinet ministers quick to put the boot into their latest bete noire.
Having recently tried to make political capital out of saving the nation from a meat tax which had no chance of happening, the frontbenchers tried to fuel the fires further with obvious pot-shots at vegetarianism more generally.
Environment Secretary Therese Coffey sneered that meat substitutes - seen as an important tool in fighting climate change - were good for astronauts but no-one else.
Another minister, Claire Coutinho - who actually holds the Net Zero brief - suggested that Keir Starmer's enthusiasm for taxing your sausages (the utterly fictitious policy mentioned above) was only to be expected from someone who'd sworn off the bangers himself.
Their rather juvenile sniping is pretty pathetic, not least because the simple maths that their boss, Rishi Sunak, always tells us is so important makes clear that there is no credible path to Net Zero which doesn't involve cutting greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
That doesn't have to be a tax incidentally, but it could mean nudge tactics or public information campaigns about the health and environmental benefits of eating less meat.
Instead right-wingers would rather position themselves as the last bastion against the moral squeamishness which is corrupting kids and infecting institutions and if that means full blown war against the "tofu-eating wokerati" - the words of the always loveable Suella Braverman - so be it.
Rather depressingly I'd prefer a much more grown-up approach to this debate. As a vegetarian since the age of seven it is something I care passionately about, but it's also an issue where I've tried to combine conviction with conciliation.
I was the only vegetarian I knew until my early teens and perhaps this taught me the value of consensus building. I would defend my beliefs firmly when I felt someone was mocking them, but I was never an evangelist. So much so I've often felt that should I ever have children I would be unlikely to raise them veggie at least until an age when they could unequivocally choose this path themselves.
That is incidentally a difficult moral judgement but it's one I maintain needs serious consideration.
More broadly I have considered the veggie option offered at pubs and restaurants proportionate given levels of demand. I have always been perfectly pleasant to pescatarians - if not the restaurants which insist on putting little green V's next to scampi and chips. I take vegetarianism rather seriously but hopefully not myself - good humour can often buy you a lot of credit.
And yet I do bristle when the culture warriors of the tabloid press try to turn what is a perfectly valid belief into something to be rubbished for the sake of sowing division.
The sight of Piers Morgan wincing in disgust when he sampled Greggs' meat-free sausage roll or The Sun, only this week, running stories of faux outrage over the fact that vegan comedian Lee Mack chose not to use a hook and line during a guest appearance on BBC angling programme Gone Fishing are all too common.
Although both examples perhaps hint at the real fears of the critics, not simply that people have the audacity to give up meat but they are now doing so in numbers that signal just maybe a genuine change could be underway.
When the country's most popular hot food outlet launches a flagship vegan product it proves that this meat-free business is no longer a preserve of faddy North London restaurants. By the same token, if a working class northern comic announces he's cut out the cutlets it's hard to suggest the trend is still confined to sandal-wearing "eco-zealots".
Veteran MP Tony Benn's comments about the nature of progress do not prove such a trajectory is inevitable or that trends cannot be reversed but on a lot of issues - from equality to environmentalism - those who once made a radical case paved the way for a cause to become mainstream.
It is instructive that one of the few policies to emerge out of Tory conference that was built around a broad consensus, rather than trying to drive a wedge through the electorate, was the proposed ban on new smokers.
This would have been inconceivable some 60 years ago, when 70 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women smoked. Changing attitudes have since seen numbers plummet, so much so that there is no significant electoral risk or body of opinion to stand in the way of total prohibition. It is notable that Liz Truss, whose views are perhaps far more accurately the definition of fringe, is among a small number of objectors.
The once mighty tobacco lobby has unequivocally lost and even someone like Sunak can see the obvious benefits of a ban - even as he continues to rage against measures to reduce air pollution, which to be honest is far more damaging to young lungs than a habit hardly anyone takes up anymore. But that's perhaps a story, and a battle, for another day.
The seismic shift away from cigarettes brings to mind Simon Amstell's faux-documentary of a few years ago - Carnage - which envisaged a future where meat and dairy consumption had been almost totally renounced.
The idea that the psychological barriers which protect an obstensibly animal-loving population from the true horrors of industrial farming had broken down is not an entirely implausible future. A lot of moral judgements are closely interlinked and when one considers the public disgust at trophy hunting or mistreatment of pets it is only a small step to a majority of people suddenly turning decisively against agriculture.
Maybe one day the jokes of Coffey, Coutinho et al will seem as outdated as ads which insisted cigarettes were good for you.
I would never try to predict the future but there is always the chance that the debate on whether to tax meat becomes ultimately unnecessary. Why would we tax something to discourage consumption when consumption has already nosedived.
Or maybe some distant successor of Rishi Sunak, who in another time and place would have sneered and mocked a minority pushing for change, will try and get credit for delivering something he could find almost no-one any longer opposed.
More broadly I have considered the veggie option offered at pubs and restaurants proportionate given levels of demand. I have always been perfectly pleasant to pescatarians - if not the restaurants which insist on putting little green V's next to scampi and chips. I take vegetarianism rather seriously but hopefully not myself - good humour can often buy you a lot of credit.
And yet I do bristle when the culture warriors of the tabloid press try to turn what is a perfectly valid belief into something to be rubbished for the sake of sowing division.
The sight of Piers Morgan wincing in disgust when he sampled Greggs' meat-free sausage roll or The Sun, only this week, running stories of faux outrage over the fact that vegan comedian Lee Mack chose not to use a hook and line during a guest appearance on BBC angling programme Gone Fishing are all too common.
Although both examples perhaps hint at the real fears of the critics, not simply that people have the audacity to give up meat but they are now doing so in numbers that signal just maybe a genuine change could be underway.
When the country's most popular hot food outlet launches a flagship vegan product it proves that this meat-free business is no longer a preserve of faddy North London restaurants. By the same token, if a working class northern comic announces he's cut out the cutlets it's hard to suggest the trend is still confined to sandal-wearing "eco-zealots".
Veteran MP Tony Benn's comments about the nature of progress do not prove such a trajectory is inevitable or that trends cannot be reversed but on a lot of issues - from equality to environmentalism - those who once made a radical case paved the way for a cause to become mainstream.
It is instructive that one of the few policies to emerge out of Tory conference that was built around a broad consensus, rather than trying to drive a wedge through the electorate, was the proposed ban on new smokers.
This would have been inconceivable some 60 years ago, when 70 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women smoked. Changing attitudes have since seen numbers plummet, so much so that there is no significant electoral risk or body of opinion to stand in the way of total prohibition. It is notable that Liz Truss, whose views are perhaps far more accurately the definition of fringe, is among a small number of objectors.
The once mighty tobacco lobby has unequivocally lost and even someone like Sunak can see the obvious benefits of a ban - even as he continues to rage against measures to reduce air pollution, which to be honest is far more damaging to young lungs than a habit hardly anyone takes up anymore. But that's perhaps a story, and a battle, for another day.
The seismic shift away from cigarettes brings to mind Simon Amstell's faux-documentary of a few years ago - Carnage - which envisaged a future where meat and dairy consumption had been almost totally renounced.
The idea that the psychological barriers which protect an obstensibly animal-loving population from the true horrors of industrial farming had broken down is not an entirely implausible future. A lot of moral judgements are closely interlinked and when one considers the public disgust at trophy hunting or mistreatment of pets it is only a small step to a majority of people suddenly turning decisively against agriculture.
Maybe one day the jokes of Coffey, Coutinho et al will seem as outdated as ads which insisted cigarettes were good for you.
I would never try to predict the future but there is always the chance that the debate on whether to tax meat becomes ultimately unnecessary. Why would we tax something to discourage consumption when consumption has already nosedived.
Or maybe some distant successor of Rishi Sunak, who in another time and place would have sneered and mocked a minority pushing for change, will try and get credit for delivering something he could find almost no-one any longer opposed.
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