IT HAS never been clear, at least to me, exactly why Nick Brown was dumped as Minister of Agriculture. Though sharing the countryside opinion, if not the usual reasons for it, that his handling of the foot-and-mouth epidemic was a disaster, the truth is he carried out the Government's policy dutifully and, I would say, with maximum despatch.

The main countryside criticism boils down to the slaughter in the early phase of the epidemic not taking place fast enough. What do these critics want? Perhaps a machine gun should be issued to every parish, oiled and ready for immediate use by trained local volunteers if so much as a single sheep begins to look a bit dodgy on its feet and round its mouth.

Anyway, since Margaret Beckett took over from Brown, she has simply picked up his baton and run with it. Almost her first pronouncement on foot-and-mouth expressed the need to "bear down'' on the disease. Ah yes, "bear down". If Nick Brown used that phrase once he used it a thousand times.Where has "bearing down" brought us? Six million animals, from more than 8,500 farms, burned or buried. The total cost so far is £2.1bn, almost three times the annual budget of the late and unlamented Maff. And yet the end is still not in sight. NFU leader Ben Gill speaks of the disease re-erupting in the autumn.

A ludicrous notion is now circulating that the epidemic was started by the Government to attack farmers in a tit-for-tat for the Tories' assault and battery of the miners. I suspect that William Hague was playing to this crackpot gallery when he said in the Commons that there was "huge suspicion'' in the countryside on the origins of the outbreak.

Meanwhile, what of tourism? Worth four per cent of our national wealth compared with just one per cent for agriculture, it also employs a rising seven per cent of the workforce compared with farming's falling 1.5 per cent. Yet, while foot-and-mouth has cost the farming industry £775m, it has cost tourism £5bn, not counting associated losses, to builders, suppliers etc. And the £18m paid out in compensation to tourist ventures pales beside the £1bn paid, or due to be paid, to farmers. In fact, since the cash help for tourist ventures is repayable loans, rather than the grants paid to farmers, and the outlook even for next summer is uncertain, few tourist businesses have sought a share of the £120m put up by the Government.

Before any financial implications emerged, my view was that the mass slaughter was insane and barbaric. Now, Europe is reliably reported to be poised to re-adopt the policy of vaccination that Britain persuaded it to abandon ten years ago.

To most other EC countries, slaughter on the scale pursued by Britain is simply not an option. In Holland which successfully ring vaccinated around its recent outbreaks, meat exports have already resumed.

If civilised values, allied to the strong evidence of the successful use of vaccines elsewhere, had prevailed at the start, almost all the hardship and heartbreak caused by the foot-and-mouth outbreak could have been avoided. All those who vigorously pushed the culling policy, especially farming leaders like Ben Gill, who reportedly swerved the Government from an imminent decision to vaccinate in April, should hang their heads in shame.

Published: Wednesday 15, 2001