Originally from: mark purdey
                        
Dear All,

I do not feel that having confrontations on chat sites is necessarily a bad thing, providing the criticism is accurate and does not become 'personal'.

In this respect, I feel that I have had every right to defend my true position whenever I have been false accused over the last few days. Inaccurate and personal comments should be debarred from posting at the start, then no childish stupidity is going to ensue.

The core of my issue is not about my own subjective grievances over the refusal of BCMS to grant a calf passport to me and whether I am prepared to use the internet to communicate, but it is about the far more serious and far reachingdemise of the smaller farmer and the misguided New Labour policy to 'restructure agriculture' and 'depopulate livestock' as Nick Brown himself had stated. Any opportunity for the seemingly legitimate slaughter of livestock has been grasped since New labour have come to power – TB , BSE cohorts, the national scrapie plan ( or whatever it is called ) and now those late passport application animals get committed to the slaughter squad. 170 cows a day are being slaughtered at bridgewater abbattoir for TB alone – yet nobody is trying to identify the true cause – which would put us in a better position to curb the outbreak of the disease – same issue with BSE too.

As i have said before, this is an appalling waste of food resources when we have so many in the world short of food.

Some of you may have read John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where the US gov literally bulldoze out whole swaths of farmers who could not pay their rent, etc. Today we have a similar situation , except it is an insidious metaphysical bureaucratic bulldozer that is undermining the very cornerstones of our businesses and driving us beyond breaking point. No one considers the psychological stress that one endures whilst trying to keep the everyday activities of the farm going, yet simultaneously having to deal with all of this government contrived mandatory hype. Almost 75% of the farmers have got divorced in my area since foot and mouth.

It is all designed to wear us down , until we throw up the towel. It is breaking the best of us.

I started up farming with one acre in the mid 1970s, and have worked for every penny I own. I am passionately attached to the small farming lifestyle, and am therefore experiencing chronic emotional pain at having to witness the current state of affairs and the hopeless prospects for our future under New Labour and their multinational corporate paymasters. Whilst it might be the 50–150 acre farms which they want gone today, it will be the 1000 acre folks that get targeted tomorrow.

Best,

mark purdey