Sir Brian’s long-awaited programme about the badger cull will be available on the BBC on Friday. For our badger group, campaigners and anyone else who has bothered actually to ensure they are informed before voicing their opinions, I doubt it will contain anything we don’t already know but I think it will be a huge wake-up call for the majority of the population who have been sucked in by the lies put out by the farming industry, the shooting and hunting industries, a succession of governments and the media. The hope is that people will be as shocked as they were and are by the Post Office scandal. In advance of the broadcast Sir Brian has equated belief in the effectiveness of the cull with another myth: “It’s the same as being told in the Middle Ages, if you burn witches at the stake, it’s going to protect your crops. It’s the same kind of blind belief.”
There is definitely panic and desperation in the air on the other side. Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, can always be relied upon to shoot himself in the foot through ignorance (at best), misinformation and overreaction. He is trying to stop the BBC from airing the programme at all, accusing the corporation of bias and May of being “partisan”. Tory MP Greg Smith has said “This is an insult to every farmer that has had to put down entire herds because of TB.” Mr Smith, it really, really isn’t, that is a preposterous and totally misleading thing to say and you know it.
As I predicted the other day, they are trotting out the old nonsense that badgers are a principal cause of hedgehog population decline. Gareth Wyn Jones, a vociferous and opinionated Welsh farmer has predictably chipped in too: “In my belief they have got no scientific evidence. We have heard Brian May speak … he and his team really believe that all of the TB happens on the farm – it is either brought in by other cattle or there is cross contamination with the slurry. So literally blaming the farmer.” Well, if it is the fault of the farming industry …
The real point is though that none of these people have seen the documentary yet, they cannot possibly know whether it is ‘biased’ or not. I do know that Brian May has been painstaking in his efforts to engage with farmers and to listen to them, and their views will be represented in the programme. But these people are not interested in reason or scientific evidence. I am pleased to say that they seem to have made Brian properly angry and he has now replied with this bold and perspicacious statement:
Meanwhile, Ed Swales of “Hunting Kind” (what an oxymoron) has been campaigning for fox hunters to be granted oppressed ethnic minority group status. Incredibly, he is not joking. What he is doing is outrageously and grievously insulting genuinely oppressed minority groups. There is a danger of allowing ourselves to forget that fox hunting has been illegal since the Hunting Act of 2004 but has continued unchecked, perpetrated by criminals ever since.
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