Taking a stand for animals is a safe, non-controversial position, Clark contends, and “no political party in recent times has come to much harm by doing something to help furry, feathery or scaly animals.” Proof of this is that over the past 20 years, Parliament has passed dozens of animal laws, “controlling the use of animals in circuses and in advertising campaigns, laws against sow stalls and numerous others.”

The oddity of this, Clark observes, is a contemporaneous unwillingness to even discuss the status of unborn human children or to consider reforming Britain’s outdated abortion laws. “There seems to be an unwritten rule in politics that the issue must not be discussed, and that anyone holding views which are disapproving of current practice on abortion must be dismissed as an extremist or religious nutter,” he laments.

“A Martian looking at us from the outside might well conclude that it is a committee of animals which sets the terms of our political debate,” Clark wryly comments. “How can it be that we swoon over baby chicks, calves, puppies and the rest, and yet seem blithely indifferent about the industrial-scale destruction of human foetuses?”