Originally from: mark purdey
                        
Hi,

Yea, I think these civil servants run these so called consultation reviews with the interested parties,etc, merely so they can be seen to be democratic, as well as providing a kind of protection if things go wrong in the future; eg; the truth coming to light in some way.

They tend to run these reviews with the more unpopular, 'batty' schemes which they ( rightly ) feel may run the risk of showing up to be flawed in the years to come – just like this national scrapie plan ( NSP). This style of consultation kind of betrays their own shakiness and uncertainty in what they are trying to do. But history shows that they have never acted on anything that has been raised from these reviews.

My experience is that these autocratic individuals take no notice of what anyone says anyway. The feedback from the consultation is merely filed away in some moth eaten vault as a future safeguard which provides evidence that they did consult 'widely' , were democratic, etc. This acts as a means of appeasing any awkward questions that might arise from opposing forces in the future as a result of their ineptitude, or negligence as is so often the case.

The problem here is that no one knows anything about the National Scrapie Plan outside of the government – except the poor sheep famers who have found themselves victim to this final farcical solution. And what kind of political clout have "mere" sheep famers got in the modern techno-driven world anyway ? They have been totally disempowered by the present government.

The officials managed to keep the NSP out of the limelight by downplaying their whole intentions and categorising the whole exercise as a kind of exclusive, elitist black and white operation that had to be enacted. They padded the whole thing up in pseudo science and then surreptitiously slipped it through the system on days when major popular news stories were dominating the mediascene.

In fact, the actual success of the NSP getting passed through parliament, largely hinged on the fact that a very influential key Livestock guy on the NFU stood to make millions ( and I mean MILLIONS ) through selling the electronic genetic identity tags that are all part and parcel of this scrapie fiasco. If there was no NSP, then there would be no need for his tags. And furthermore, the single Lord who lobbied for the NSP in the House of Lords turned out to be making a major slice of his income out of marketing "quaranteed scrapie-free" breeding rams !!! I think that it was only he and three other peer chums ( eg; who supported him ) that had been motivated to turn up in the House of Lords on the day of the vote for compulsory scrapie slaughter. This had obviously controlled the outcome of the vote – not a very democratic vote that day.

Its sick , how the modern democratic system provides loopholes through which the vested interests of a mere one or two well positioned individuals can skillfully and immorally manipulate against the best interests of the millions of people in their country – and , in this case, against the long term interests of the entire sheep farming population.

Another good example involves the pressure that is currently been put upon the Canadian government and farming community for live animal testing for BSE
– despite, in real terms, the country only having experienced two cases of BSE in total. A couple of pharmaceutical companies have seen the lucrative potential of marketing live BSE tests for every cow in Canada ( at 10 dollars per cow ) , and so the 'better looking' so called scientists on their payrole have been unleashed onto the world to deliver a flashburst of sharp suited, first class hotel seminars in order to scaremonger the media and high ranking government officials into buying their live test. Conference attendees find themselves presented with a bogus array of predictions of a massive 'black death' epidemic of BSE and vCJD in the years to come if they do not listen to their sound scientific wisdom and purchase their testing NOW . Abit like what happened here in the UK when the government gave away four million of our taxes to Professor Roy Anderson ( or is he Sir Roy Anderson by now ? ) to manacure the statistics so that it looked like we were going to get an epidemic of vCJD that attained a crisis of biblical proportions. I am amazed that Anderson is still in business on any level at all, particularly since his TSE forecasts were totally wrong and that he got kicked out of Oxford Uni for smearing one of his colleagues with a sex allegation. The government just seem to give him more money to cover up his former aberrant predictions, so he can churn out yet more aberrant predictions which provide no useful service to anyone or anything on this planet, besides sidetracking the money away from spending on bombs! Well, I suppose it all betrays who government oficials are in bed with.

 Basically, it all boils down to the fact that a handful of corporate scientists need a hyperinfectious BSE-vCJD melt down hypothesis in order to make their living – but, in countries like Canada, it is all at the expense of the livelihoods of the half of the population whose income is rooted upon agriculture. But does the world really need their useless test anyway ????? No way I say. The only safeguard against BSE is to clean up our radioactive metal waste NOW, and watch the health and safety aspects of our technological processes more carefully in future.

We live in very undemocratic times. Until we get some spin-free thinking, ethical journalists of sound integrity back on the national newspapers again, government officials and , more importantly, their corporate lobbyists will increasingly get away with launching virtually any legal vehicle that suits their own autocratic agenda . They just couch the wording of the Acts that they devise in a way that will quarantee that their proposals will slip through to the statute book with minimal opposition . For instance, in respect of the NSP , they just have to raise the emotive issue of all of the children who have died of vCJD as a result of scrapie ( despite being disproven ), and the uninformed, gullible ministers will give it the nod.

Best Wishes,

Mark Purdey