Slaughter of the healthy

AGERMAN acquaintance once told me that, after living in London for a year, he'd concluded that the British are far more Teutonically authoritarian than his own supposedly lawobsessed nation. In particular, he was astonished by the number of "forbidden" signs he saw everywhere (No Parking, No Waiting, No Sitting, No Standing, No Smoking, No Hawkers, Keep Out, Keep Off the Grass), and by the negativity of our service industries, from hoteliers gleefully telling you "we're full", to restaurants with unwelcoming "wait here to be seated" placards, and waiters smugly responding "it's off" when you give them your order. "Give an Englishman a clipboard and a shred of authority," he told me, "and they all turn into traffic wardens, because saying 'no' is your national sport."

I saw exactly what he meant earlier this year, because I happened to be on a Cumbrian farm when the men from Maff arrived with their "No Admittance" signs, closely followed by a vet with a clipboard who announced (with barely concealed delight) that the 1,800 sheep there (including family pets) would be killed immediately, even though the results of their foot-and-mouth tests hadn't come through. It later transpired that they'd all been healthy, but each sheep got a bullet through the skull anyway, their carcasses were left rotting for days before eventually being buried at an airfield, the Maff officials were all paid overtime, and I embarked on a quest for some kind of an explanation from the Government.

As a start, I phoned Tony Blair's press officer, Julian Braithwaite, and asked if he'd ever been to Cumbria, and received the sort of patronising laugh he might have emitted if I'd asked if he'd ever holidayed at Butlin's in Filey.

The concerns of anyone living north of Islington were clearly of no interest to him, and I came away feeling I'd been talking to the living embodiment of the New Labour caricature who first mistook mushy peas for guacamole.

Still no word from Blair but, 10 days ago, I finally received a reply from Elliot Morley (a junior environment minister), expressing sympathy while asserting that the culling policy has been "harsh but effective". I wonder if he'd be quite so confident publicly now, after last night's Outbreak: The True Story of Foot and Mouth (C4) demonstrated conclusively that appalling indecision and complacency by the Government has led to millions of animals being slaughtered unnecessarily, often in the most grisly and inhumane way.

Watching four-month-old footage of Nick Brown claiming that, "We have it under control, we are eliminating it", when his 24-hour slaughter policy was routinely taking three or four days (thus nullifying its supposed benefits), confirmed my belief that Will Hay and his pals had been in charge of the thankfully now-defunct Maff. As a result, an outbreak that could have been rapidly quelled spiralled out of control, with 8,000 outbreaks and three-and-a-half million animals destroyed, and it's still not fully under control. If that's an effective policy, God help us if they ever implement an ineffective one.

With meticulous attention to every bleak detail, the programme showed how Maff's vain and incompetent scientists spent many weeks refusing to accept the findings of outside experts, until Blair (with his precious election date in peril) belatedly went over the ministry's head and took personal control.

But few of those in power have ever questioned the validity of the slaughter policy itself, and only now are politicians starting to wonder if their strategy was not only ineptly implemented, but fundamentally wrongheaded too.

When Prince Charles (who seems to be getting saner by the day) suggested vaccination as a less brutal alternative, Ben Gill of the National Farmers' Union went ballistic, protesting that it would affect meat exports (worth approximately 1/2 billion annually); so instead, the politicians set the countryside ablaze, destroying the international credibility of our tourist industry in the process (losses so far estimated at 5 billion, and rising), and then spent billions more on compensation, thus tempting some farmers to cross- infect their flocks deliberately. And with 90 on offer for a culled ewe, as opposed to a few quid for a market-ready one, is it any wonder that certain wily country folk came to look on the Government as a cash cow, and decided to milk it dry?

GRIM and joyless though it necessarily was, this was a fine and timely programme from Peter Dale's department.

But I hope there will soon be a companion documentary which looks at alternative forms of disease control that are less gruesome than these barbaric culls, and at the armlock which the foot and mouth- free United States has on the world meat trade, because that's the single main reason why vaccination isn't a standard procedure throughout Europe. Up in Cumbria, they still find very little to smile about over this whole wretched affair, because there's never been anything very funny about slaughter. Unless you remove the first letter, I suppose.

Copyright 2001
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