The Industry’s Dirty Secret
Factory farming doesn’t survive because the public supports it. It survives because the industry has spent decades and billions of pounds making sure most people never see what they’re actually paying for, hiding industrial confinement behind cheerful packaging, reassuring labels, and welfare claims that are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, deliberate lies.
The Public Is Already With Us
Here is something the industry doesn’t want you to know: most people, when they find out the truth, are already on our side. A majority of the British public supports a ban on factory farming. Four in five people oppose CO₂ gas chambers for pigs once they learn they exist. More than eight in ten oppose the killing of day-old male chicks, which happens to around 45 million of them every year in this country. This is not a minority position, or a fringe campaign, or a lifestyle choice dressed up as politics. It is the settled view of most people in Britain, who have simply been denied the information they would need to act on it.
Project Slingshot exists to change that, and our commitment is clear: factory farming ends in the UK by 2040. Not reformed, not rebranded, not made marginally less awful while the industry’s lawyers buy another decade of delay. Ended.
Why 2040
Fourteen years is long enough to allow a genuine, planned transition that works for farmers, workers, and rural communities rather than simply collapsing the system overnight. It is short enough that it demands action now rather than a succession of consultations that trail off into nothing. Fixed deadlines reshape investment, political calculation, and business planning in ways that vague aspirations never manage to do, because every new intensive unit built on the assumption that nothing will change is locking in 15 to 20 years of production that will need to be unwound anyway. The sooner the destination is clear, the fewer bad bets get made.
The strategy moves in stages, each one creating the conditions that make the next one possible: stopping expansion now, converting the government’s existing welfare commitments into binding law with actual dates, prohibiting the most indefensible practices, stripping out the public subsidies and cheap capital that keep the system running, and managing the final closure of what remains in a way that is funded, planned, and fair. You can read a more detailed account of how that unfolds in our roadmap below.
How We Win
Slingshot’s role in this is upstream. We don’t pass the laws ourselves; we change the cultural conditions that make passing them possible and make defending the status quo politically untenable. We do that campaign by campaign, drumbeat by drumbeat, until the industry’s most reliable weapon, which is the public’s ignorance of what it funds, is gone for good.
2040 is the line. Sign the petition and help us hold it.