For those of you who missed it, Tonight with Trevor McDonald (has ever a name been so apt...) last night (Tuesday) had an 'expose' of animal rights activists. With the usual quality editing and disrupting interview techniques activists are painted in the worst possible light.

So what's new there! The animal rights movement has taken worse and came out stronger. Certainly the last few months of mainstream hysteria is failing to have the expected effect the government and their partners in the pharmaceutical industry desired - that of breaking the wide scale public support for animal rights by the country at large.

Instead companies the size of Novartis, GSK and AstraZeneca duck awkward questions of how many people their drugs have killed this year. They cry wolf with declarations they will leave the UK if life and their right to make billions out of people's illness is not made easier and untroubled by animal activists. Such moans are all the better for covering up falling share price as their drugs come under criticism or have to be withdrawn for being lethal.

So, despite their game-plan being written about previously on Indymedia, the state continues with the same modus operandi. On Thursday, the case management conference for the Huntingdon Life Sciences injunctions trial is to be held. Also, coming up is David Blunkett's speech offering more draconian erosion of the right to protest for which the animal rights lobby gets the blame as usual - even though it is the militant hunters promising to break the law, carry out threats of violence against people and animals and generally bring the country to a halt. Already they have started hospitalizing hunt sabs, setting fire to railway lines, attempted motorway blockades and destroying national monuments. Not to speak of promising to harass MPs and other anti-hunt people.

At 7am on Monday morning 7 animal activists were raided and held all day, before being released without charge. The alleged crime for which this huge expendature of time and police effort was made was that a farmer lost the keys to his car at a demo several weeks ago... no wonder police will not have time to stop the fox hunting lobby from their planned path of disruption and mayhem. Unfortunately for the police, the raids did not turn up any evidence of illegal behaviour so the raids could not be publicised on national TV to happily coincide with the Trevor McDonald program.

So, the pattern repeats. Upcoming media events - Blunkett and court case - which are about suppressing animal rights protests, are preceded by events either in the media or designed to play to it. The aim to continue the long discrediting of this successful movement and protect corporations. Meanwhile the vested interest of pharmaceutical and foxhunters get all the positive attention when that is the last thing they deserve.