The [tag]animal rights[/tag] group [tag]Speak[/tag] has just been censured by the Advertising Standards Authority for a “misleading and inaccurate” quote it attributed to the chairman of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE), Sir Michael Rawlins.
The [tag]ASA[/tag] received a complaint from [tag]NICE[/tag] saying that the quote – which appears on the front of leaflets the group hands out at protests in Oxford – was taken out of context. The ASA ruled against Speak and also criticised it for its “apparent disregard” of the advertising rules (it failed to respond to the complaint).
I actually went through the Speak leaflet point-by-point [near the bottom] the first time I came across it in five months ago, and called their truncated Rawlins quote “weak” in its justification. The ASA looked further into the issue and found that when Rawlins said that “the animal testing regime… is utterly futile”, he was in fact only referring to animal testing in a very small area (if you really want to know: long-term carcinogenicity studies with known genotoxic compounds or compounds that produced hyperplasia in chronic toxicity tests).
Speak does knowingly and purposefully mislead people with its claims – something that has been widely exposed by the Pro-Test movement – but of course it is defiant, as it always is. A posting on Speak’s website said it “remains unapologetic in reproducing a quote that first appeared in a national daily newspaper and we reserve the right to use the quote in the future”.
The increasingly paranoid Speak has now added NICE and, incredibly, the ASA to its long list of organisations who are involved in some kind of ill-defined conspiracy against it. The post refers to the “tactics of NICE” and how the ASA “rubber-stamped” the complaint which was “so obviously political”.
I have been following this whole saga closely for six months now and frankly the spotlight shone on the organisation in that time has shown it up for little more than a tight-knit group of deluded individuals, fed by bitter fury and characterised by an absolute refusal to listen to reason or argument.
The ASA judgement is just one more nail in Speak’s coffin. If the organisation wishes to do what it claims it does – protect the rights of animals – it has to rethink its entire approach. And that means giving up its reliance on emotive and misleading language and ending its intimidation tactics.
I suspect though that if those elements were pulled out, there wouldn’t be very much left that its current members would want to be a part of.
