Murdoch, Badgers and the Dotty English - 24th July 2011

At last the summer parliamentary recess has arrived and I write this column from Butare in the heart of equatorial Africa where I am teaching trainee teachers. From such a distance one gets a proper sense of proportion about world events, be it the horror of what has happened in Norway, or the unfolding famine in the Horn of Africa – caused as much by Man’s inhumanity as by the vagaries of drought. It certainly puts our own media obsession with Rupert Murdoch into a proper context. 

To be fair, I received very few emails from constituents about that affair, and those that I did get were early on, and informed by a perfectly justified fury at the hacking of Millie Dowler’s phone and those of other victims.

The culture of parts of our press is in desperate need of reform. I have some experience of it. Some readers may recall that six years or so ago, a clutch of my stolen emails filled two pages of the Sunday Times. Subsequently another Sunday newspaper tried to run a fabricated story that the theft was the work of a jilted mistress as an act of desperation occasioned by the pangs of her unrequited love!

My ‘take’ from afar is that Murdoch was once a great newspaperman. He certainly saved that  national institution The Times, and probably saved Britain’s entire newspaper industry by his victory over the print unions at Wapping – something for which the political left has never forgiven him. As his media empire grew, however, he lost touch with the reality of what was actually happening in his newsrooms with disastrous consequences.

 The world moves on, and so has the tide of my emails, not to Norway or to the Horn of Africa, but to badgers. The Government has announced a cull –which should have come as no surprise as it was in my party’s election manifesto and in the coalition agreement- but England, by email, has risen in moral outrage. Some correspondents challenge the science behind the policy, or argue for a more effective control measure. Unfortunately such emails are few, the majority rely purely on sentimentality – our typically English view of nature which owes so much to Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Graham. The tenor of most of my emails are that Badgers are nice cuddly creatures and it is wicked and beastly to kill them.

 When I was a boy we used to find hedgehogs in the garden almost daily but I haven’t seen one in years. The fact is that the badgers, which are voracious predators, have eaten them all. This is sad, but it is not the economic imperative for a strictly limited and tightly controlled badger cull in two specific pilot areas. The reason is that the balance of scientific opinion is that the unchecked growth of the badger population is instrumental in the spread of Bovine TB which is now costing us as taxpayers £1 billion every year, and we simply cannot afford it any longer. A decade ago we were slaughtering 10,000 infected cattle a year, now it is as high as 30,000. The unchecked spread of this disease is the real animal cruelty.

Correspondents, demand that – instead of a cull - we simply vaccinate the Badger population. This is an excellent idea, but the reality is that we do not yet possess a vaccine that is practical and effective – which is why we are spending £20 million trying to develop one, but in the meantime it would be irresponsible to just stand by and hope.

The sight of Anders Behring Breivik justifying his monstrous deeds in Norway was truly chilling.  There is, of course, a gulf between thought and action, but I probably get two or three emails per week filled with the same sort of racist bile, loaded with menace, often purporting to be driven by Christian beliefs – of which the authors clearly know nothing. This sort of insecurity is so un- English. We are a fundamentally placid and decent bunch, our concern for animal welfare, and the protection of badgers – even if a little dotty- is a measure of that decency. Long may it continue.