Nothing But Lies

No One Believes the Lies

Be honest. Has there been a single moment during the foot-and-mouth outbreak when you felt confident the Government knew how it had started, where it was spreading and what measures were necessary to bring it to an end?
From day one, the message of Agriculture Minister Nick Brown has been that he has taken the relevant advice and is doing what has to be done. As cases soared and the disease spread like wildfire, he stuck to this story.
Diseased animals were not killed soon enough. So the disease spread. When they were killed, their carcasses were not burned quickly enough. So the disease spread wider.
Bring in the Army to help with the killing and disposing of carcasses, the Government was told. They wouldn’t do it. Even when troops were used, it was to help with traffic.
In the country there was total confusion. It closed because one could not use footpaths, or walk anywhere near livestock. Yet the Government, which feared ballooning compensation claims from the tourist industry, said it was not closed.
Environment Minister Michael Meacher said the country was ‘open for business’ but every footpath near his £ 500,000 house, in Ampney Crucis, Gloucestershire, was closed, and the landlord of the local inn said: ‘Everyone has shut up shop. If this goes on much longer we will all be out of business.’
Tony Blair said that the last thing on his mind was elections. Yet that was what he was caught discussing with European Commission President Romano Prodi during a summit in Stockholm. He told Mr Prodi he had ‘about ten days’ to decide whether or not to call one.
Those who saw this moment on TV will not easily forget the sly way in which Mr Blair – glancing at the camera like an apprehensive cod, suddenly aware that he was being overheard – changed the subject hastily.
Afterwards, we got the usual cant about him focusing solely on the foot-and-mouth outbreak and giving no thought whatsoever to elections. No one – including his most slavish supporters – believed this. Why insult us by parroting it?
From the day it started, the Government has played down this plague deliberately. They have done everything possible to pretend it is not a crisis but merely a problem which Agriculture Minister Nick Brown and his advisers have under control.
Pretending there was no crisis meant they could have their General Election – a year before it’s necessary to have one – under the most favourable circumstances.
They’d bag another five years before the electorate wakes up to a crashing economy and the realisation that on a wide range of issues – hospitals, transport, education, Europe, the so-called Balkans strategy – this Government has failed.
Now that foot-and-mouth is a fullblown crisis and there is a prospect of electors punishing Tony Blair, we were told that it was all the fault of ‘dodgy’ farmers transporting sheep around the country to make fraudulent claims for EU subsidies.