The catalogue of official
criticism levelled at the Government for its incompetent handling of the
foot and mouth crisis grows larger, almost by the month. The latest report
into the way the fight against the £8 billion rural disaster was managed
concludes that the now disbanded Ministry of Agriculture was guilty of a
"serious misjudgement" about the likelihood of an outbreak. It also found
that Ministers made mistakes in the way they tried to bring the disease
under control and failed to take into account the degree to which tourism
would be adversely affected. But the overall impact of the Commons Public
Accounts Committee findings barely scratches the surface of the magnitude
of mismanagement, neglect and cover-up that characterised the Government's
entire response to the foot and mouth disaster.
The slings of
arrows of this report - just like those from the European Parliament, the
independent experts and other interested organisations - will no doubt
bounce off the thick hides of the guilty Ministers with little or no
ill-effect.
True, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
was dismantled as a sacrifice once foot and mouth was over, in order to
satisfy the need for a scapegoat. And Nick Brown, an honest and
hard-working Agriculture Minister who had the ill-luck to be heading Maff
at the time of the crisis, lost his job. Yet Defra, which has proved
itself no more effective a champion of British farming, has been formed in
place of Maff.
As far as New Labour is concerned, foot and mouth is
dead and buried; the blundering, bungling and cover-ups that went on are
old news and no one outside of the few thousand farmers and tourist
business operators who were affected gives a stuff. How
convenient.
The fact that the Government refused point-blank to
agree to a public inquiry - even though Environment Minister Michael
Meacher acknowledged at the height of the crisis that one would have to be
held - can now be seen for the cynical political ploy that it always was.
And the fact that Ministers successfully persuaded a court not to force an
inquiry despite pleas for a judicial review - supported financially by the
Western Morning News and others - is once more exposed as a massive missed
opportunity to get at the truth.
Without a full, open and
accountable inquiry, with the power to call senior Ministers - right up to
the Prime Minister - and demand answers from them, the true scale of the
secrets, lies, deceit and errors surrounding the handling of the foot and
mouth crisis will never be known. All the inquiries that were held have
been either restricted by the sphere of interest of the committee
involved, like this one which concentrates only on the financial
implications, or hamstrung by a lack of real teeth and proper access to
those who made all the fateful decisions.
As a result the most
serious accusation - that Tony Blair hastened the cull of thousands of
healthy animals in order to end the disaster in time for the election -
never had the airing it deserved and the true motives behind some of the
most damaging and heart-breaking actions taken during the crisis have
never been tested. That is, and will remain, unforgivable, particularly
for a party said to be committed to "open government".
But the
Government is clearly unmoved by this report, or its significance. Being
accused of making a "serious misjudgement" over a crisis that passed more
than two years ago holds little terror for Ministers, particularly when
the department coming in for the attack has long since been wound up. It's
rather like being savaged by the famous "dead sheep" - as in Dennis
Healey's unforgettable Parliamentary put-down of Geoffrey Howe. The timing
of this report - on the eve of a war with Iraq - virtually guarantees it
will be buried... as has so much about the Government's desperately flawed
conduct, throughout the disaster.
Yet there are serious lessons to
be learned from these diluted findings, and worrying indications that
little heed is being paid to them, just as the lessons following the
1967/68 foot and mouth outbreak were ignored with catastrophic results.
Worst of all, the politicians who made, at best, crass errors of judgement
and, at worst, calculated political decisions which destroyed people's
lives, are getting off scot-free. And that's bad for democracy
itself.
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