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, Dad's Army style, 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. It was stuck firmly in my craw long before Ms Beckett sought to ram it in even further.

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 ominously 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, but hope I am wrong, that William Hague was playing to this crackpot gallery when he said in the Commons that there was "huge suspicion" on the origins of the outbreak.

Naturally the Government, faced with the daunting task of improving all our public services or else, is delighted to be spending the equivalent of 1p on income tax fighting an animal disease, and it would be overjoyed if Arthur Scargill, at the head of his re-formed legions, was a regular caller at No 10.

Meanwhile, what of tourism? Worth four per cent of our national wealth compared with just one per cent by 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. And all this, please remember, to protect an export trade initially valued at £570m but whose true worth is closer to £350m.

My view was that the mass slaughter was insane and barbaric.

To most other EC countries slaughter on the scale pursued by Britain, that self-styled nation of animal lovers, is simply not an option. In Holland which successfully ring vaccinated around its recent outbreaks, meat exports have already resumed and Dutch consumers are readily buying meat from vaccinated animals.

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, inside and outside farming, 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: 11/07/2001