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JIM SPENCE: Van Gogh soup protesters won’t win hearts and minds with their hypocrisy

Photo shows two protesters in front of Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting in the National Gallery, London. Red soup is drippign down the painting and the two protesters are holding soup cans to the camera.
A strange way to win hearts and minds? The protesters who threw soup over Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting. Image: Just Stop Oil/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock.

One tin of soup isn’t much. But to a hungry person it’s the difference between an empty belly and a full one.

That’s why activists destroying good food while impoverished folk are using food banks are a sickening sight.

The folk who threw a tin of soup, which could have fed a hungry bairn, over Van Gogh’s sunflowers painting in London and the animals rights protesters, who poured fresh milk over the floor of an Edinburgh supermarket, claimed to be sending a message.

But the signal they sent was one of hypocrisy.

Their double standards, in claiming they want to save the planet from human greed and excess while simultaneously wasting good food, are nauseating.

image shows the writer Jim Spence next to a quote: "Their tactics aren't only stupid, they're ineffective. They may draw attention to their causes, but winning hearts and minds is more difficult."

Some of these activists are drawn from a well of privilege.

Their arrogant sense of entitlement, in ramming their views from climate change to veganism down our throats, reeks of hypocrisy.

Will Van Gogh soup throwers face justice?

Many come from well heeled backgrounds and wouldn’t know what a hungry day or a week’s graft feels like.

Their febrile minds have been whipped into a state of mass hysteria convinced that Armageddon is approaching.

Many of them will be wearing clothes which are mass produced by low waged workers in sweatshops in third world countries.

photo shows two protesters who have thrown tinned soup at Vincent Van Gogh's famous 1888 work Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London.
The Van Gogh soup protest made headlines, but will it make any difference? Image: Just Stop Oil.

They’ll organise their sit-ins and protests via mobile phones powered by the use of lithium, in many cases produced by child labour in the likes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In the Edinburgh store the perfectly good milk which they cowped over the floor would be cleaned up by minimum wage workers from less rarefied worlds than these sanctimonious impostors who want to control what we eat and drink.

An ordinary punter vandalising a painting in a gallery or emptying the contents of the chiller in the supermarket on the floor might be looking at a stretch in Perth prison.

So it will be interesting to see how the law treats spoiled rich kids who think they can commit criminal acts with impunity.

Maturity missing from Van Gogh soup and supermarket milk protests

Rather than accept there are arguments to be made and trying to persuade others of their views, they take the easy shortcut in full view of television cameras.

Their view is always right; no dissenting voices can be tolerated.

Their tactics aren’t only stupid, they’re ineffective.

They may draw attention to their causes, but winning hearts and minds is more difficult.

We’ve all been 20 years old and thought that we could change the world.

We’ve all been convinced that our views are so self evidently right that no right thinking person could possibly hold different ones.

Then we grew up and realised that the world is a much more complex place than our once underdeveloped minds had realised.

photo shows a man and woman pouring milk over the carpet in a Fortnum and Mason store.
More supporters of Animal Rebellion pouring out milk in Fortnum and Mason in London: Image: Animal Rebellion/PA Wire.

It’s called maturity.

Rational argument trumps silly stunts

I’ve been a vegetarian for 40 years – albeit one who’s fallen off the wagon with a fish supper occasionally.

But I’m fairly certain vegans won’t convince meat eaters that a plant based diet is better for them by pouring fresh milk over shop floors.

Instead they might try to engage folk in rational argument as to its supposed benefits.

It might help their cause too if many of the plant based substitutes sold in supermarkets and produced by huge conglomerate food manufacturers didn’t also taste like soggy cardboard.

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