Virginia Postrel picks up on the story of animal rights activists intimidating yet another construction company:

The UK government has been urged to take emergency action to combat animal rights extremists after Walter Lilly, a subsidiary of the Montpellier Group, pulled out of an £18 million (USD $33.3 million) contract to build a new center for animal research at Oxford University. The decision was widely attributed to intimidation by animal rights extremists, although Montpellier would only say that the decision was reached by mutual consent with Oxford University.

While this specific incidence is new it is of course an old story. Huntingdon Life Sciences has been attacked for over a decade along these lines. HLS is the only lab left in the UK that can do the mandatory testing on new pharmaceuticals so if it failed or went bust there would be a halt to new medicines being introduced, a fairly major side effect one might think.
The intimidation campaign against them has spread to the most peripheral people: they were a listed company and their share registrar was threatened so much so that they had to delist (subsequently listing in the US instead). They also had terrible problems with their bank (Royal Bank of Scotland), the activists so scaring the staff that their account was rejected. It is for this reason that they are the only commercial company with an account at the Bank of England. (Imagine all commercial banks, Citigroup, Bank One etc etc rejecting a company’s account on the basis of threats to their staff and the Fed providing services as the US equivalent.)
The Montpellier Group is, sadly, just the latest in a long line of companies to have been threatened.
Scooting back over newspaper archives I see that they have also been threatening judges (and their mothers!), the HLS auditor (Deloitte and Touche no less) sufficiently for them to resign, and even to the point where the Government itself is their insurer as no one else would handle the business.
You will have to register (free) at http://www.telegraph.co.uk to see what I mean, but you can piece the story together from here here here here here and here or once you have registered, use the search function for “Huntingdon Life Sciences”. The archives go back five years.
I’m sorry Virginia (and Glenn) but this whole thing goes a lot deeper than just that one new lab. There are those who value animal rights above human rights so much that they will do anything to stop even the testing of pharmaceuticals, such testing being something required by law before a drug’s introduction. And they will not just intimidate but attack, car bomb, and in certain cases parcel or letter bomb to do so. And it’s been going on a long time.