Western Daily Press (Saturday)
New report vindicates action on bovine TB
The UK is gradually making progress in the battle against bovine TB but, given the length of time its spread was allowed to go unchecked, it won’t be a quick or easy victory, Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Farming
DEAR George It’s a pretty sorry state of affairs when the state broadcaster can’t even get a minister’s name right. This at least, was the conclusion I was driven to when I noticed your misspelt surname plastered all over the BBC website last week. Not once – which might have been excusable – but repeatedly, which is not.
Ah well, standards are not what they used to be at the BBC – not that they ever were – and while I’m on the subject of the BBC I suppose we had all better start bracing ourselves for more slanted reporting following the latest announcements about bovine TB.
I can just hear the quill pens being sharpened and the inkwells filled as Brocks’ Buddies set about deluging us with more tedious correspondence as to how badger culling has failed to eliminate TB. Well, no one really expected it to immediately. What we expected it to do was to put a brake on the number of new cases being reported every year, which it has certainly done.
As a farmer pointed out to me this week, it was never going to be possible to reverse in a few years the damage that had been done by our friends on the Opposition benches, who sat on their hands for more than a decade and did absolutely nothing about bovine TB and specifically about controlling badgers, all for the sake of maintaining the support of the animal rights lobby.
We had a chance, a very slim chance, of getting the genie back in the bottle had we started taking the badger issue seriously 20 years ago, but that chance was wasted as ministers played for time by calling for more and more reports and studies.
Anyway, I really believe the latest report vindicates our tackling the badger menace as a priority, though I am as alarmed as I imagine you will be to read that farmers are suspected of deliberately sending to market cattle they believe might be infected but haven’t been tested in order to get shot of them.
This, George, cannot be allowed to continue. For one thing it merely provides the anti-farmer factions with more ammunition to lob back at us, but more importantly it undermines totally all the good work that has been and is being done to sort out this mess – at a not inconsiderable cost to the state, I might add.
As to the suggestion that ear tags may have been switched in order to pull a similar stroke, then that, equally, is going to take us nearer to the situation where it is finally ordained that all cattle will have to be microchipped like cats and dogs, something which, I imagine, will go down rather badly with farmers given that the cost will fall on their already overburdened shoulders.
I would just make this one plea and that is that if any farmer becomes aware of anyone bending or indeed circumventing the rules then he should immediately grass them up. Partly because if TB cases start back on the upward track after next March it will inevitably besmirch our national reputation and could potentially (and without the protection of the European Commission to fall back on) make things very sticky indeed for the export sector.
Yours ever, Ian