Common Decency

The badger cull appears to be working in Somerset, if figures from farmers are to be believed, says Ian Liddell-Grainger main article.

Despite claims of the pro-badger groups, the culls appear to have hit their objectives, Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Farming Minister George Eustice in this, his first letter to Westminster of 2015

Dear George

Seasonal greetings and all that and I hope your Christmas break went as peacefully and enjoyably as mine – though there was a good deal of hard labour involved chez Liddell-Grainger. Had you peered over the fence this week you would have observed the writer hard at work with a pick-axe under close instruction from Mrs L-G as she set about sorting out the garden on a day where the frost had left the soil with the consistency of granite.

I can however, take comfort from the fact that I have broken the back of the task. And I am delighted to report that the badger-enriched compost I spread last year (as a result, you may recall, of my having a defunct member of the species dumped on my doorstep and subsequently providing it with a final resting place among the leaf mould and potato peelings) has done wonders for the brassicas.

Speaking of badgers, we are now seeing some really encouraging figures coming in as a result of the mass removal of so many hereabouts, all of which argues very strongly for not only continuing to bear down on badgers (if you'll forgive the pun) where eradication has already started but to continue to roll out the cull to other areas – such as your patch, where I believe they are desperate for some government intervention.

What farmers fear most, of course, is that the result will go the wrong way in May and we'll be back in the hands of an administration which knows nothing about the countryside, cares even less, believes badgers to be not merely innocent but the victims of unwarranted persecution and will see to it that it's farmers who have to carry the can for sorting out the mess created as a result of the sheer negligence of Benn and the others in doing the square root of damn-all about badgers last time round.

Were that to happen then you and I can probably agree on the outcome: there will be uncontrolled and illegal shooting on a massive scale because farmers simply will not be prepared to stand by and be forced out of business by a government which ignores the all-important science demonstrating that culling works – the absence of which they put forward as their miserable, pathetic excuse for their previous inactivity.

There'll be a knighthood for that guitarist bloke who's a stranger to the barber's chair and who has been walking around like God minus one ever since they asked him to bang out a few chords on the roof of Buckingham Palace for the milleniumfest; while farmers caught harming badgers will be forced to wear black-and-white furry costumes and banged up in the stocks. The images are simply too awful to contemplate.

Incidentally, I see little Raymond round at the NFU has put out a new-year bleat saying the Government must do more to support British farmers. I find that somewhat amusing when all I'm getting at ground level is British farmers saying the very same thing about the NFU. Happy new year.

Yours ever

Ian

Read more: http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Badger-cull-working-ndash-t-say-NFU/story-25799952-detail/story.html#ixzz3OhmHhHlP

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