A response to a great article about veganism

This is a slightly different type of blog to the sort of thing I normally write, but still worthwhile, I hope!

The inspiration came from an article by Jack Rear on Pretty52 concerning 'Why we should all be vegan from the perspective of a non-vegan' (actually the author is someone who though I've never met, has been a reasonably close acquaintance of mine for quite a few years and I tend to take a look out for his articles as they are always engaging and thought-provoking). You will probably get more out of this blog having read that first, but I will say that generally I found that the article made me feel very optimistic about the future of our dietary habits. As someone on the cusp of going vegan, and having experienced all of the narrow-minded attitudes of our culture, it does occasionally feel as though I'm part of a vegan echo chamber. Reading and agreeing with articles encouraging veganism is one thing, but the authors of these are normally 'staunch vegan activists' such as the woman interviewed in the article. People like this have taken on all of the same values that I have over an extended period of time, and thus are not as reflective of wider society as I would like. This article stood out to me as something written by someone who for the most part has not been as close to it, yet was still geared very much towards veganism being the way to go. Seeing someone logically weighing up all the data from an outsider's perspective and reaching that conclusion is refreshing, if anything.

A bit about my own background on this… I'm not quite a full-time vegan yet, but I am well on my way to it. I became vegetarian when I was about 15 - I was studying Food Tech for GCSE and it was as simple as the fact that the vegetarian module appealed to me more than I expected it to and I decided to give it a go. This was before I was as politically aware as I would later become, but I suppose in a way the decision was a pre-curser to that - I don't think I could ever do the work that I do on my campaigns whilst eating meat. Becoming a vegan is more a political decision. Last year I decided to take part in Veganuary, and it was an awful struggle. This was partly due to the fact that at the time I was living in Colchester, which is not known for the forward-thinking viewpoints of its residents. There was very little I could substitute for animal products, so I ended up just having a very limited diet. There was no way that I could keep it up full-time, but it did lead to me making a decision for how I would go vegan: every year I spend a successive number of months following a vegan diet, until either I'm doing it all year (which won't happen until I'm 34) or until I don't want to stop at the end of my cycle (which is a lot more likely to happen). I have had quite a lot of people laugh at me for this, but to me it's a very logical approach - I don't like cutting down gradually because I think you just end up compromising more and more until you're as bad as you were to start with, so spending increasing amounts of time being vegan seems like a better way of handling it. Plus, during my cycles I learn more about different substitutes for animal products, which I continue to use when I'm not on a cycle. It's nearly the end of my 2017 cycle, but when I stop I will be eating fewer animal products than I was before - who knows, maybe next year I'll be doing it for good.

I'm not going to talk about the reasons why everyone should be vegan because the vast majority of it is talked about at length in the article I've linked to. I'll just go through a few things that people don't always realise, though it is of course all my subjective experience:

• Becoming vegetarian is markedly easier than becoming vegan.

I love being vegetarian. It's a lot more than just something that is fuelled by a political belief, it's a lifestyle that I get an immense amount of enjoyment and satisfaction from. I do not miss meat at all, and whilst I remember the taste I cannot remember what it was I ever liked about it. Yes, I do frequently get the 'But bacon!' response from people, and it really doesn't mean anything. It's probably not something that a non-vegetarian can understand, but once you're doing it you come to notice a host of flavours that you were never aware of before. I think a lot of the time meat is overpowering enough to drown out the flavours of other things you're eating. Becoming vegan is different. Whilst this cycle has been a lot easier than last year, it varies from day to day. Sometimes I feel great about it, sometimes I'll get a lot of cravings for things, most commonly cheese and chocolate. The bottom line is, I believe passionately in veganism and I think if I wasn't doing it I'd be a total hypocrite, so it is going to happen. I guess you can get used to anything and I'm getting used to this - who knows, perhaps one day it will give me as much pleasure as vegetarianism does. It's just a harder road.

• If you're vegan, people will feel threatened and take offence.

I read a Facebook meme recently that made me chortle: 'Today I saw a dietician. Well... actually they weren't a dietician before, but when I told them I was vegan they immediately became one.' It's sad, but true. From the scepticism of 'You can't possibly be getting enough protein!' to the downright bizarre 'Oh, you think you're better than everyone else, don't you?' being vegan seems to be something that really gets on people's wick. Jack talks a bit about this in the article, how being vegan is associated with moral righteousness. I'm really not sure where this comes from. There are of course quite militant vegans, just as there are militant people representing every social movement (and these people tend to shout the loudest); but I tend to feel that people see you as being militant even if you're not being. I don't think I'm militant with anything except possibly smoking, but I know that I'm thoroughly irritating when I talk about my beliefs, be that diet or anything else. Being irritating is not something I set out to do, but it's quite evident that this moral righteousness is something that is associated with me. It can be a little bewildering at times, but I tend to feel that if you know you are talking sense, that shouldn't matter.  If someone tells you that you think you're better than them, it's probably because they are insecure about themselves - even if you do think you're better than them, what's so terrible about that? You're allowed to think things about yourself in relation to other people, that's how human beings are. Ultimately, I think that everyone should do their research and form their opinions accordingly, and dissenting opinions are only worth listening to if they are coming from a place of reason and logic, as opposed to personal threat.

• Veganism is not a religion.

This is particularly important. Another meme I recently came across detailed the following exchange:

'I would be vegan, but I couldn't give up cheese.'

'Then GO VEGAN EXCEPT FOR CHEESE!'

The way the world is right now, it is not physically possible to live a 100% vegan lifestyle, as so many things are made using animal products - the new £5 note being a topical example. I can talk until the cows come home about how most of the so-called health detriments to being vegan are nonsense, but ultimately everyone is different, and some people are more suited to adopt a vegan diet than others. The bottom line is that everyone should be as ecological as they are physically able. This goes beyond just animal products - there are a huge number of food brands that I boycott because they do something which goes against my own causes. The list could by rights be a lot longer, had I not as a consumer stepped in and pointed out to myself that in order to live, I have to make compromises. If I boycotted everything I had something against, I'd never eat, drink or wear anything at all, and there comes a point where you need to prioritise yourself. Having accepted that, you can then start to decide where you are going to start. As I have detailed above, I don't feel able to completely convert to veganism right now, but I am well on the way and I have a clear system for how this is going to work. I think everyone should have some kind of moral standard that they live up to, but this should be something that they set themselves. Once we have accepted that, we can sit back and feel content in the knowledge that, whilst we may disagree on exactly what form this takes, ethical eating is here to stay.

The importance of whistleblowing

Again, I haven't written in a while…

Shortly before leaving office, Barack Obama announced that Chelsea Manning would be released from jail after three and a half years (though realistically quite a bit longer than that if we're including the amount of time she spent in detention leading up to and during the trial). For those who don't know, Manning released the very disturbing Collateral Murder video, as well as numerous other classified military documents, to Wikileaks, exposing some quite significant material concerning airstrikes in the Iraq War. She was recently described by President Trump as an 'ungrateful traitor' who should 'never have been released' in the wake of the announcement of her commute. She will be released from jail in May.

Since I started blogging in 2010, I have written quite a lot about Manning, and ordinarily the announcement of her release would have prompted me to write a full blog, but so much else was happening at the time that this had to be put on the sidelines a little. Manning's situation to me underlines a really important thing within our society; the concept of whistleblowing. A whistleblower is defined as 'a person who informs on someone engaged in an illicit activity'. It is something that has become increasingly significant within the world over the last few years, notably due to the widespread use of social media. Besides Manning, the most infamous whistleblower is probably Edward Snowden, who in 2013 copied and leaked information from the National Security Agency revealing numerous global surveillance programmes around the world, including within the UK. As an activist, I tend to believe that as little information as possible should be kept from the public, as I think that the proper way to run a community is through openness, honesty and transparency. I will accept that there are certain areas in which it is appropriate for exceptions to be made to these principles, but they should be exceptions and not the rule. In short, I believe that if something that a Government or a corporation does is scandalous enough for someone to blow the whistle, this is something that should be taken extremely seriously, and the consequences should be felt by the initial perpetrator, not by the person who exposed it.

This last thing is something which I feel we all seem to have lost sight of. If we are to live in a society that is accountable to its citizens, the ability to air the establishment's dirty laundry is public is surely essential for our political health. For the most part, whistleblowing is not only a good thing, but a necessary thing. Yet it seems that action taken by the establishment to address instances of whistleblowing focus more on the problem of the whistle having been blown than on actually sorting out anything that has been exposed. For example, after Snowden's exposures of the UK's illegal surveillance programmes, the then Home Secretary Theresa May introduced the Investigatory Powers Bill (commonly known as the Snoopers' Charter) which passed into law shortly after her ascension to Downing Street in 2016. I shall say that one more time to make sure we are completely clear - after revelations that the Government was spying on its citizens illegally, the immediate reaction from the Government was to pass legislation to make such spying legal and official Government policy. This seems to me duplicitous and underhand, to be pursuing the ability to continue such tactics after their existence has been exposed, rather than tightening reins and examining the reasons why such tactics were illegal in the first place.

I first became aware of the term 'whistleblowing' in a documentary that I saw as a teenager in 2007 concerning reporters going undercover within supermarkets to expose public health risks such as faked expiry dates on food products. This struck me as being a public service, and as it is we have a Public Interest Disclosure Act in order to protect whistleblowers in such circumstances. What concerns me at the moment is the draft recommendations for the new Espionage Act, which is all part of the review of the Official Secrets Act. This Act would effectively criminalise all means of releasing sensitive Government information to the public, and a defence of 'public interest' would not be submissible. The Law Commission recommends up to 14 years in prison. Most disturbing of all, whilst the Official Secrets Act currently applies only to UK citizens, the recommendations extend beyond the whistleblower themselves to journalists or anyone else who received the information, anywhere in the world.

Take a moment to digest this. There are a great number of negotiations and discussions going on right now, in the UK and in the world at large, which potentially could fall under the banner of 'sensitive information'. Theresa May's plans for Brexit, for example. The details of the trade deals she is attempting with various world leaders (which in many cases seem to equate mostly to agreeing to whatever dodgy deals the UK is given). Potential cases of fraud in elections, which is still something which has not reached a conclusion where the present Government is concerned. Our involvement in wars in the middle-east. The list goes on. We live in very divided and turbulent times - no one, on any part of the political spectrum, would deny that. And in such times, it is vital for journalists, and indeed anyone else, to be able to report on the truth of what is going on behind closed doors, and to be able to prove that information. Enacting legislation that criminalises not the people who are actually breaking the law, but the people who expose that information, is more than merely protecting national security; it simply screams of not having the honesty and integrity to be able to justify our own position in the world.  'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear': that is a tedious phrase which we all hear very frequently, and I normally scoff at it because it is merely a cover-up for unnecessary and unethical surveillance of each one of us. I find it incredibly ironic that such an establishment would go to such extreme lengths to cover up its own doing. After all, 'nothing to hide', right?

The Espionage Act is still at the consultation stage, so please feel free to contact the Law Commission and let it know what you think of the proposals.

Refugee status in the UK