A Peasant Revolts

In the past two months my e-mail inbox has received 6,000 messages from well-informed country people who, like me, believe this has been one of the greatest cock-ups ever by the British state. Here in my inbox is all the evidence you need to expose the lies, spin, incompetence, cruelty, waste and pathos of policy run amok: the inside story of how MAFF turned Britain into Plague Island.

In objecting to the orgy of killing, I was for some time rather lonely. Most newspapers and broadcasters were too lazy to investigate anything for themselves and slavishly followed the government line that the slaughter was essential. The BBC was the worst, offering news bulletins that sounded as if they had been written in Whitehall.

But there was also the first handful from people who agreed with what I was saying. Abigail Woods, a courageous vet and historian, a graduate of the Cambridge University veterinary school, who is now writing a thesis on the history of foot and mouth, offered his encouragement.

The United States Department of Agriculture told me that the mortality from the foot and mouth disease was usually less than 1 percent. I spoke to vets in Ottawa, Washington and Israel; to microbiologists in New York and Cardiff; and to farmers in Holland, France and Germany. So I ratcheted up the abuse, denouncing the slaughter, the corruption, the cost, the pollution, the lies and the collusion.

Other correspondents were interested in the murky origins of the outbreak, which the government has blamed on Chinese restaurants, pig farmers, sheep - everything but itself.

In addition to the serious compromise of animal welfare orchestrated by a minister who had voted to ban foxhunting because it is "cruel", the countryside was reeling - and the cost of controlling the epidemic dwarfed the value of the livestock industry being protected.

Beyond Whitehall the peasants were starting to revolt. Peter Kindersley, a former publisher, was now doing a bit of farming. Sharing a horror of the slaughter, he turned his farm's website over to the cause. With its devastating critique of the government, attacking the science, economics and execution of the slaughter, www.sheepdrove.com became the virtual headquarters of a resistance army.

By now, sheepdrove.com has encouraged an extraordinary campaign of active opposition to the cull, all organised via e-mail. When a MAFF killer squad showed up at Oaklands Park farm in Gloucestershire (which is also a school for the mentally handicapped), there were 250 demonstrators on hand to keep them out.

Groups are now active in the Forest of Dean, Devon, Cumbria and Yorkshire. We are getting stronger and the morale of government forces in the field is cracking. An example for this is a letter signed by 40 vets working at the FMD command centre in Dumfries, one of the main MAFF kill zones. It shows that the Mafia's own killers no longer believe in what they are doing.

Source: The Sunday Times, 29 April 2001