Originally from: Farmtalking
                        
Pass the humane killer, and let the lesson begin
From: ...

Originally from the Times by Michael Gove

Margaret Beckett has been reading her Christopher Marlowe. Did the Government make mistakes during the foot-and-mouth crisis? Yes, but that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.

Like Marlowe's Barabas, the Government acknowledges fault without expressing contrition. Indeed, to invite penance from ministers is to be seen missing the point. Foot-and-mouth? So last year, so first term, so September 10. That was another era. And besides, the issue's dead.

The Government's response to yesterday's publication of the report on the Lessons to be Learned from foot-and-mouth is a shrugged shoulder and a wounded frown. We've already learnt our lessons, thank you very much. The Ministry of Agriculture's been culled. Nick Brown, its luckless frontman, has been put out to grass. And the modernisation of that foetid breeding-ground for disease, the British countryside, continues apace. So can we please move on? Actually, let's not. Let's pause for just a moment and consider what this whole episode tells us about how we are governed. Foot-and-mouth was not an isolated episode in the Government's life, signifying little beyond the need to drain the brackish backwater that was the Ministry of Agriculture. The crisis was a defining moment.

Three fundamental weaknesses of the Blair administration were laid bare. In its metropolitan political correctness, its tendency to centralise all decision-making and its addiction to spin, the Government turned a single act of God into a five-act human tragedy. For which we are still paying the price. The cost can be reckoned in billions. Thousands of healthy animals were needlessly slaughtered, compensation was paid for losses that should never have been incurred and the rural economy in all its diversity has still to recover. The foot-and-mouth debacle ranks beside Black Wednesday, not just in terms of money thrown away in pursuit of a criminally foolish policy, but also as a monument to an administration's failure to learn from history. Ah, history. A section of the library where no Blairite ventures. And certainly no member of the Government thought to learn from the one text that had lessons worth implementing. Because political correctness dictated that no Blairite could be seen to be deferring to inherited wisdom, let alone that which had been bequeathed by a duke. The Duke of Northumberland's report into the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 1967 contained a series of recommendations which, if carried out, would have massively reduced the damage wreaked by the epidemic.

It recommended the immediate deployment of the Army to help with the speedy cull of diseased animals, the burial rather than burning of carcasses to limit the danger of infection spreading, and the use of vaccination. When all these findings were brought to the Government's attention they were dismissed as though ministers were being recommended to apply wolfsbane and bread poultices on the basis of some alchemist's manual. Didn't we realise that environmental science had moved on since 34 years ago? Take advice from a duke? What feudalism is this? Rather prescient feudalism, as it turned out. The Government eventually deployed the Army, five weeks too late, started burying carcasses one month too late and has now come round to vaccination, a whole year later. Never mind its folly in continually ignoring the House of Lords, if only the Government had attended to the House of Percy so much misery might have been averted. What use now is a report on Lessons to be Learned when the Government was so unwilling to implement any of those which we learnt so painfully in the past?

The failure to learn from the Northumberland report was far from the only example of the Government's disastrous political correctness. The closure of local abattoirs in conformity with EU regulations left the countryside without an infrastructure for the effective slaughter of livestock well before the virus struck. An aversion to field sports and distaste for those who derive their employment from them meant that hunt employees and gamekeepers who were keen to help the fight against the disease were prevented from doing so. These attitudes were a consequence not so much of ignorance as prejudice. A prejudice for which all of us had to pay.

But if metropolitan arrogance compounded the Blair administration's errors the deeper failure, and one which blights its approach to every policy with which it comes into contact, was the attachment to centralisation. No section of British life has been so constricted by government regulation, so distorted by state subsidy, so subject to Whitehall's remote control, as the countryside. The crops a farmer may grow, the animals he may breed, the game or vermin he might try to kill and even the hedges he may try to maintain are all regulated by the State.

Many farmers have been willing accomplices in this surrender of autonomy. They happily became pensionaries of the State, their production directed by subsidy, their needs mediated through a national union, as surely employees of a nationalised industry as any British Leyland assembly worker of the Seventies. The failings of this policy were already apparent before foot-and-mouth in the inflated cost of food, the despoliation of the environment by the prairie-builders of East Anglia and the flight of small farmers from the land. But the management of last year's debacle emphasised how disastrous the centralisation of British agriculture had become.

The Government treated farmers like livestock – penned in to their homes for days on end, fed rubbish by ministers to keep them quiet and expected to come to heel without demur. And it treated livestock like a tyrant putting down a rebellion – ignoring its own laws to slaughter indiscriminately.

The notion that farmers were autonomous individuals who should be won over to policy, trusted with its implementation and valued for their experience was as alien to the Government as the principle that farms and livestock were private property and to be respected as such. But having taken upon itself responsibility for running the countryside, the Government proved itself grotesquely unequal to the task, having neither the officials, the laboratory staff, the vets, the valuers or even the requisite number of staff to answer telephones when the epidemic broke.

The folly of centralisation reached its apogee, however, when the Prime Minister overcame his indifference to the plight of the Tory-voting backwoodsmen of rural Britain to "take personal charge". Crisis management was put on hold while the Prime Minister was "brought up to speed" with an epidemic which was accelerating out of control. Incapable of managing the crisis, Mr Blair instead fell back on his one area of undisputed expertise and sought to manage the news.

And so the third great weakness of this Government was given full exposure – its belief that to control perception of events is to control the only reality that matters. And the one perception that must never be allowed to take root is the notion that the Government is failing. The sole piece of rural machinery with which the Government is entirely at home – the muckspreader – was revved up and sent into action.

The victims of this epidemic, the farmers, were smeared as the villains. Dodgy farming practices were blamed for the outbreak when it was almost certainly a failure of meat importing rules. Dodgy farmers were blamed for spreading the disease, when the Government's own incompetence in managing the cull was the single greatest factor in its growth. And dodgy farmers were blamed for rigging compensation, when the greatest economic crime, the destruction of the tourist industry through the closure of great tracts of the countryside, was a consequence of the Government's failure to embrace a vaccination strategy which would have kept rural Britain open for business.

The real lessons of the foot-and-mouth disaster are ones which this Government is incapable of learning. Its aversion to inherited wisdom and institutions, its relentless desire to arrogate ever greater control to the centre and its compulsion to manage the media are ineradicable maladies. This is one case where a cull is the only sensible policy. July 23 02