Animal testing for cosmetics is of course wrong, but let’s get our priorities right on cruelty and Brexit

There are more serious animal welfare problems, says John Rentoul. And they have nothing to do with EU rules

The government could do with a good news story about animal welfare to distract from outrage over the fate of Geronimo the alpaca (PA)

What is a right-thinking Independent reader supposed to make of this morning’s headline about animal testing? We report that the testing of cosmetics ingredients on animals, banned in Britain since 1998, could make a return after a Home Office decision to follow EU rules.

How can that be right? Even if you don’t agree with Brexit, shouldn’t our departure from the EU mean that we no longer have to follow EU rules if they involve cruelty to animals?

As you might imagine, the story is complicated. It turns out that the EU ban on animal testing for cosmetics, and on the sale of any cosmetics containing ingredients recently tested on animals, was not as absolute as it seemed. It conflicted with a different EU law about the safety of chemicals generally. That conflict was last year resolved by an EU decision requiring two chemicals used only in cosmetics to be tested on animals.

Last week, the Home Office confirmed to Cruelty Free International that the UK would be following that decision. This is, I think, unlikely to lead to any actual tests on animals. Nobody wants to do them; there are alternatives; and the EU’s slow legal processes have not been exhausted.

But good for Cruelty Free International for publicising the problem, which might force the government to do something about it. After all, Priti Patel at the Home Office needs a distraction from her failure to deal with asylum seekers crossing the Channel in small boats, and George Eustice, the Defra minister who has the animal cruelty brief, could do with any news story that isn’t about his insistence on the demise of Geronimo the alpaca. It would be easy, and useful Brexit propaganda, for any minister to announce that Britain won’t follow EU law on this after all.

Even so, we should realise that this is a late skirmish in a battle that was won long ago – and that it has little to do with Brexit. Obviously, if the UK wants to sell things to the EU market, whether we are EU members ourselves or not, we would have to follow EU rules for those products.

If Brexiteers want to trumpet the benefits of our departure from the EU – or if pro-EU animal rights advocates want to find a silver lining to the dark cloud of it – the ban on the export of live animals for fattening and slaughter is more important. That is one of the few changes to British law made possible by Brexit, and it could come into effect as early as next year (these things do tend to move slowly).

The ban is interesting because it is an exception to the rule that EU membership doesn’t generally prevent a country from having higher animal welfare standards than the EU minimum. The transport of animals between EU countries, however, was a matter for EU law and the UK was bound by it.

There are, however, more serious animal welfare problems than the theoretical risk of a return of animal testing for cosmetics, or even than the long-distance transport of livestock. I think the welfare standards for most of our pigs, chicken and fish are too low. And our EU membership was no bar to our adoption of higher standards.

In my view, animal welfare is a matter of priorities, and British politics has its priorities in an awful twist. The fate of Geronimo is only the latest example of how sentiment outweighs reason about animals. I have just been reading the prime ministerial papers for the first months of Tony Blair’s government in 1997, which have been released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule, which is gradually being reduced to a 20-year rule.

One of the earliest memos about cabinet committee meetings, two weeks after Labour came to power, has the prime minister’s comment written across the top: “Can someone sort out all this stuff on fox-hunting. I don’t see it as a HO [Home Office] priority at all.”

Blair never did see it as a priority, and he was quite right, but the strength of feeling in the Labour Party on the subject meant that hunting was eventually banned in 2005.

It never made sense to me. Of course, hunting is cruel, but foxes have to be culled somehow, and the harm recedes into insignificance against the huge industrialised cruelty of intensive factory farming.

Let us get our priorities right and do something about the unethical production of cheap meat. We didn’t need to leave the EU to do it, but perhaps if we told our Vote Leave ministers that it would make us different from and better than the EU they might be tempted to do the right thing anyway.