Whose rules are they playing by?

The recent news that a building worker arrested for assaulting a 70-year old animal rights campaigner will not be charged, coupled with an incident at last week's demo, where a man who spat at and used obscene language against a 69-year old woman was neither arrested nor cautioned, will come as no surprise to those campaigning against the animal research facility being built in South Parks Road, where peaceful and often elderly campaigners have been subjected to intimidation and harassment by the now infamous Thames Valley Police.

One wonders whether individual police officers experience pangs of conscience about the conduct of this discredited force - if they joined the profession in the belief that they would in some way help to uphold the laws of this country, they would surely be ashamed to find themselves little more than Oxford University's private security guards or - as some might be tempted to say - bully boys.

The police's role in Oxford in recent months has done nothing to gainsay this reputation - rather, it has compounded the view that their agenda has become increasingly sinister and underhand where 'dealing' with SPEAK's legal and successful campaigning strategy is concerned. A catalogue of illegal arrests for handing out leaflets has been compounded by the intimidation of elderly women and children, failure to uphold the law and - possibly their most contemptible act to date - the arrest of a disabled woman for showing workmen a lump on her back in an attempt to demonstrate the effect of drugs which tested safely on animals but which have disastrous side-effects on humans.

Such tactics smack of moral bankruptcy, and as the campaign against the laboratory continues to gather momentum, we can expect to see more of the same tactics. Fortunately, animal rights campaigners are a tough breed of people, who aren't fazed by bully-boy tactics. Thames Valley Police can rest assured that we will be back, week after week, and the more they use a rod of iron to try to silence us, the greater will be our resistance. The only way to defeat a bully is to stand up to them and face them down. It is a fact well documented that bullies are bullies because they have an inferiority complex; as the police show their weakness by their actions, so the animal rights movement shows its strength through its resilience and its compassion.