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There was a sickening smell from the foot and mouth epidemic when it was at its height in the early Spring of 2001. It was the pervasive stomach-wrenching stench of thousands of animals being burnt on pyres and of hundreds of thousands more, rotting in fields and farmyards. The smoke has long since cleared; the bodies long since removed. But that smell continues to hang around this rural nightmare because of the way it was so disastrously, incompetently and cynically handled by the Government. Ministers might try to tell themselves that this issue is now closed and that those four little words, foot and mouth disease, no longer hold any resonance for people in Britain. But they are wrong, certainly so far as the rural areas worst affected are concerned. Here, the anger, the frustration and the deep sense of injustice will not go away. Those feelings were given sharp focus again last week when the Western Morning News revealed exclusively the evidence given by government vet Jim Dring
about the first days of the outbreak. Mr Dring believes he could have prevented the disaster if only he had been more rigorous following his inspection of the Northumberland farm where it all began in February 2001. This story is not about Mr Dring. In no way should he be held up as a scapegoat. His honesty is wholly commendable and he might well be taking too much blame on to his own shoulders. The point is that his frank admission sheds crucially important light on the start of what became the most costly and damaging episode in British farming history and should have been made public. That bad smell is back, not because of what the honest Mr Dring is saying, but because his important admissions have been kept secret until now by a Government that, throughout the disaster and ever since, has tried desperately to cover its own back, while behaving with appalling indifference, and sometimes downright cruelty, to the rural community.
Just like the issues surrounding the Government's reasons for going to war in Iraq, the questions about the way the foot and mouth disaster was handled won't be silenced. The aftermath of foot and mouth disease received barely any national media coverage; the fall-out from the Iraq war has been virtually wall-to-wall for almost a year. But despite differences in scale, the two episodes – and what they tell us about New Labour – are similar. And in each case vital questions remain unanswered and the stench of something not quite right pervades. Two new pieces of information must now be added to the mass of evidence in support of a full public inquiry into the Government's handling of foot and mouth disease. The first is Mr Dring's revelation that whether through his own errors or those of his bosses he failed to take sufficiently rigorous action to prevent Northumberland farmer Bobby Waugh continuing to feed untreated swill to his pigs. The second is that in allowing pigswill prepared
on another farm to be fed to Mr Waugh's pigs on his own farm, the Government was breaking an EU directive, put in place long before the foot and mouth outbreak. As former Devon pig farmer Robert Persey told the WMN last week: "If that directive had been enforced, Bobby Waugh would not have had a swill feeding licence and the UK might not have had foot and mouth disease." That's a hugely significant conclusion to draw and one that clearly justifies on its own this new pressure for an inquiry. But even without these latest revelations, the case for a full, open and accountable public hearing had been well made. What the WMN's revelations of Mr Dring's astonishing evidence has done is to catapult the entire story back into the public arena and put the pressure back on the Government. Each time this happens the Government twists and turns and wriggles to get off the hook. But each time the credibility of ministers, up to and including the Prime Minister, takes another hammering.
In attempting to defend its failure to make Mr Dring's evidence public as part of Dr Iain Anderson's Lessons to be Learned inquiry, Defra claim they were fearful of prejudicing Bobby Waugh's trial for offences connected to the foot and mouth outbreak. When it was pointed out, yesterday, that his trial actually took place a month before Dr Anderson published his findings, they switched tack and tried to hide behind the Data Protection Act.
That is, frankly, pathetic. Who is being "protected" by such a decision? Certainly not Mr Dring whose courage and honesty in being entirely open about it is exemplary. Nor, it would seem, Bobby Waugh, who has been dealt with by the courts and has surely given up any right to such protection through that process. The only conclusion is that Defra is again trying to find something to hide behind, rather than publish information that might further incriminate the appalling way ministers and senior officials handled this plague. And if Mr Dring's soul searching admission that he could have prevented the disaster did not belong in the public domain before a lessons learned inquiry, what on earth did?
Two years ago, the Western Morning News went to the High Court to try to force the Government to hold a full public inquiry into the way it mishandled the foot and mouth disaster. We and the farming community, who took the action with us, argued that the failure to call such an inquiry was illegal and that the Government's own inquiries, taking evidence in secret, would fail to expose the full facts about this awful disease. We lost the case. These latest revelations prove we were right. Foot and mouth disease cost around £2.7 billion to bring under control. The hated contiguous cull, in which perfectly healthy animals were killed in an almost medieval attempt to stop the spread of the virus, contributed massively to that bill. Many now believe that it was unnecessary and that, in its haste to clear the decks for a looming General Election that had already been postponed once, New Labour panicked and over-reacted.
Vaccination, the alternative to culling out uninfected but "at risk" animals, was never tried because of the fears, expressed by the National Farmers Union at national level, that it might damage Britain's beef export market. But because of BSE, the overseas sales of British beef were already on the floor and worth barely £500,000 a year. Millions were wasted, lives were ruined, families were devastated and the countryside laid waste to save a £500,000 beef export industry and to ensure Tony Blair's election could go ahead when he wanted. That's the accusation from the countryside which has still to be tested by a full public inquiry. Jim Dring's bombshell about the day he inspected a Northumberland pig farm has turned the spotlight on all of that once more. It's still not too late for a proper examination of the evidence, by a robust chairman, sitting in public and with the power to call everyone to account. Is that still worth doing? Just ask the innocent victims of foot and mouth.
And they will also tell you that this is not just about securing the justice to which they are entitled but also about making sure it never, ever, happens again.

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