Government Agroterrorism?

On hearing the first reports of the return of foot and mouth disease (FMD) to this country last week, I got that old feeling of deja vu.

We’ve been here before and it reminded me of those unanswered questions that surfaced during the last epidemic back in 2001 which finally resulted in thousands of cattle being slaughtered at a total cost to the economy of £9bn.

Those questions remain unanswered to this day:

• Why did a phial of the virus disappear from the government’s Porton Down laboratory just prior to the outbreak?
• Why was no action taken following the discovery of the disease in some sheep in Wales almost a month before the outbreak was officially acknowledged?
• Why were timber merchants approached by the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to supply timber for pyres in early February, long before the true nature of the epidemic had become evident? A government spokesman said that this was only a contingency plan, yet why did it envisage mass slaughter - even including healthy beasts - at such an early stage?
  

So, I would be treating the official reports with some degree of scepticism this time round, and indeed, less than a week after the outbreak was first reported, news came that a ‘drill’ mirroring the current incidence of FMD had been taking place just days before it was spotted in cattle at a farm at Woolford Farm, near Guildford, just a few miles from the Pirbright animal research facility - where strains of the FMD virus are kept - and Merial Animal Health labs which are located next door.

Well, isn’t that a co-incidence. A drill was also being staged just prior to the 2001 epidemic and don’t these drills always pop up at the same time as the real life event?

Remember the 7/7 London bombings when Visor Consultants were carrying out an identical scenario at the same time as the so-called London Bombers were supposedly doing it for real, and 9/11 when an identical drill of airliners crashing into buildings was being staged. It sounds like it’s all staged to me.


If it was staged, who stands to gain?

Well certainly not the farmers, who, having just emerged from a dreadful summer of very high rainfall, have the prospect of facing a freeze on all movements of their livestock, not to mention a cull, and the loss of their overseas markets.

But Merial would have a lot to gain. Orders of the vaccine have already been placed and if the epidemic escalates it could turn out to be a very lucrative bit of business. Remember Tamiflu, that worthless vaccine developed by Gilead Sciences Inc, doled out in vast quantities in answer to the Bird Flu scam - the firm that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a financial interest in?



Of course, in order to place a liability smokescreen over any direct involvement, Merial, with the help of chief government paint and plastering agent, Lord Stevens, will no doubt put the blame on the virus escaping from their overflowing drains during the recent wet weather.

But when one looks at the ongoing antipathy of this government towards the very powerful countryside lobby - the Countryside Alliance - whose voice was loudly heard in London during 2002, there is most likely a vested interest by government to send another crippling blow to the agricultural industry, hoping that more farmers will be put out of business and others will throw in the towel. Government attempts to outlaw shooting and hunting are well known and this is just another weapon in their armoury.

In fact, it is just another blow for country dwellers generally as Simon Heffer so clearly pointed out in his piece in the London Telegraph today:

“It was a Leitmotif of the Blair government that it hated the countryside. There could be no other explanation for much of its behaviour. John Prescott, when he still held office, saw power as a vehicle for the propagation of class hatred: and, in his profound ignorance, he saw rural England especially as a place populated and exploited solely by his class enemies.

No road-building scheme could be too destructive, no housing development too massive, ugly or intrusive, that it would not serve right the supposedly Tory-voting middle classes whose own properties stood to be blighted by them.

He was not, of course, the only offender. The growing appetite to punish the motorist as a revenue-raising operation hit country people harder than most: not merely because we live in comparative isolation in many cases, but because the Government feels that public transport is a service fit to be provided only to those in urban areas. A similar view is taken of the need for post offices, so that businesses that have for years been a focus of rural life are now, in many cases, about to be obliterated.

An earlier attempt, not so far entirely successful, to wreck the rural economy was a consequence of the supremely ignorant campaign against foxhunting. And as for those other two staples of village life: the pub may be one of the 15 a week that closed permanently in 2005, despite planning regulations making it hard to use such buildings for residential purposes; and if the church is not redundant (as about 10 per cent of those built for the Church of England now are), it may share its incumbent with 10 or 15 other parishes.

So the foot and mouth outbreak, coming on top of all this decline and the recent savage losses caused by the floods, is a blow that many communities will find hard to bear. Just after the last outbreak, when the Government was trying (in another helpful pro-countryside measure) to limit the legal use of shotguns for sporting purposes, an MP asked how many fatalities or woundings had been caused by legally held weapons. The answer was that all, or almost all, such incidents appeared to have been farmers shooting themselves amid the wreckage of their livelihoods. Who is to say that there will not be such a toll this time?”

So will government doctrine eventually see the eradication of the land-owning Country Alliance lobby, turning their land over to big corporations intent on harvesting acres of GM crops and make vast profits while forcing country-folk out of their rural habitat into urban ghettos where they can be tracked and traced more easily?

I wouldn’t put it past them and their globalist minders!