Badgers, badgers, badgers!

It’s been all Brother Brock over the last few weeks and yet again I marvel at the sense of priorities of my constituents and utterly fail to predict what the hot issue of the day will be.

I would never have guessed that I would receive over a thousand letters and e-mails on the subject of Air Passenger Duty and although I would have surmised that the prevailing sentiment in Ealing North in relation to badgers would be one of support I would not have anticipated the staggering amount of correspondence I’ve received on the subject throughout October.

There is a natural human tendency to anthropomorphise badgers into either the wise old Badger of the Wind in The Willows, always pictured wearing carpet slippers in a comfortable armchair in front of a roaring fire in a snug underground sett or – on the other extreme – the evil Tommy Brock of Beatrice Potter (and you don’t want to know what he was restraining in his sack).

Badgers have had a lousy deal by and large and we use the word “badger” in memory of that foul time when a trapped badger was baited out of a tub and attacked by dogs. The poor creature would then retreat – only to be badgered out again and the process repeated until he or she died in agony and exhaustion.

As a species they don’t seem to do a great deal of harm and are actually rather inspirational in the way in which they pursue their semi secret underground lives and eat virtually anything that they can lay their paws on.

I am aware, as are many of you, of a very large sett on a railway embankment not too far from Northolt but I’ll wager that many people pass the site every day without seeing the secret city so close to their lives.

So why on earth is the government proposing to slaughter thousands upon thousands of these creatures in a chaotic crisis driven policy that is more omnivoreshambles than omnishambles? Bovine TB is the answer and it is one of many cruel ironies of the cobbled together Coalition that the current Minister of State for Agriculture and Food is a Liberal called David Heath – but known universally as Hagrid – who would once have been among the stoutest defenders of our black and white friend but now seeks to expend millions of public pounds in shooting those healthy badgers who gambol friskily in bosky woodland glade while those in their subterranean sickbeds apparently incubate the virus that leads to Bovine TB when cattle are contaminated.

There is a real problem here – no question. In 2011 26,000 cattle were slaughtered in England in an attempt to isolate the spread of Bovine TB.

The Department estimates that the cost to the nation could rise to £1 billion over the next ten years if action is not taken.

The government prays in aid the results of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial that indicated that a five year slaughtering season followed by a fallow four year post cull period could achieve – wait for it! – a 16% reduction in TB over an area of 150km2.

Surely anyone with half an ounce of wit can see that vaccination has to be the answer – imagine if humans had reacted to measles, mumps and rubella by proposing the King Herod solution!

Amazingly the Dept. for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now accepts that an injectible vaccine may be difficult to administer! Instead of which we should be trying to develop a widespread oral vaccine for badgers.

I don’t know much about the home life of the badger but if Mr. and Mrs. Billy and all the little badgers were sitting down to watch Match of the Day and some sneaky agro-bureaucrat slipped into the living room and attempted to surreptitiously inject them all while they were distracted by Fulham’s mascot causing pre-match mayhem then I should imagine that those large jaws would swiftly be brought into play and the Royle Family model would swiftly be abandoned.

The department has also indentified a “perturbation effect” in which attempted genocide of badgers may actually upset our black and white friends to the extent that they fan out further and wider – with devastating consequences.

Such ignorance and such incompetence.

I sincerely believe that the badger is more noble a creature than many of those who pad along through the underground passages of Westminster. As humans we have treated the badger appallingly and the carmageddon wreaked upon them and evidenced by the ever more common carcasses to be seen on the roadside is proof of this.

Thanks to the powerful advocacy of Dr. Brian May, a huge campaign for which I thank you and, above all, the sheer illogicity of rural mass murder the process has been put on hold.

We will revisit this but, until then, I assure you that I will continue to represent the views of my constituents in the strongest possible terms.

I do so not just because I agree with you but because public opinion in Ealing North is right and the badger deserves a break. Last Thursday 25th.October the matter finally came to a vote on the floor of the House.

The voting against the cull was 147-28. I am proud to say that I was one of the 147.