Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world. 1. Cop26 Hypocrisy We’re a full week into the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, and the hypocrisy could not be more apparent. Last week, Sir …
Prime Minister David Cameron has just carried out a sweeping and fairly vicious Cabinet reshuffle. So many of the old guard gone, some resigning and some sacked, swept aside to make room for young women, or “Cameron’s cuties” as they are known. With an election just a year away it looks like he’s panicking, and is hoping that a youthful government will appeal to the younger voter.
“I’ve looked at science and policies a lot in my career, and I think this is one of the worst policies I have ever seen.”
Most people would agree that England has a problem with bovine tuberculosis among its cattle. But many do not agree with the government’s view that badgers are to blame; that it is diseased badgers that are infecting the cattle; that the disease can be controlled by killing badgers rather than looking at farming practices; a view which ignores the science that says culling badgers will have little effect and may make matters worse.
The UK Secretary for the Environment Owen Paterson, called by some the “worst Environment Secretary ever” because of his support for so many ecologically damaging initiatives, disappeared in February. Having been responsible for an expensive and highly unpopular badger cull, he became embroiled in the crisis that brought a lot of southern England to its knees – catastrophic flooding.
The British Government seems as determined as ever to pursue its policy of killing badgers to prevent TB in cattle. This despite the “complete failure” of the pilot culls to reach their targets, the leaked information from the as yet unpublished report from the Independent Expert Panel and the slow but steady fall of the incidence of TB in English cattle due, not to dead badgers, but to tighter testing and cattle
These pilots are not on our land, but the ways the culls are being carried out is increasingly worrying and we are now concerned for the credibility and usefulness of the exercise. This sense of shifting scientific sands is a real issue for us, particularly if faced with any future proposition for wider culling.
— Patrick Begg, National Trust rural enterprise director
Diplomacy: “Tact and skill in dealing with people. The art or practice of conducting international relations, alliances, treaties and agreements … relations between nations.”
As Ministers utter inane, ill-considered, uninformed statements, they also appear to compete as to who can construct the most idiotic policy.
The official UK government policy on genetically modified (GM) crops is “precautionary, evidence-based and sensitive to public concerns”. Who are they kidding?
Digging ever deeper into the facts about the badger culls, the more I come across evidence showing they are being carried out on the basis of false figures, manipulated evidence and a lot of, to quote Hillary Clinton, “mistelling of the truth”. The more I discover, the more senseless and cruel the whole exercise appears and the more heartsick I become.
