There is a saying in the British Army. It is used when some idiot officer gets control and starts making stupid, often dangerous, decisions that won't affect him, but can spell disaster for the soldiers. It is: 'Bullshot Baffles Brains'. Never have the old soldiers' despairing words been truer than in the BBC/Brian May programme 'The Badgers, the Farmers and Me', broadcast last Friday evening.
The BBC – that is, the impartial state broadcaster, funded through our taxes – decided that in the interests of impartiality, they would allow an anti-badger culling vegan old rocker, with no remotely relevant qualifications, an hour of prime time TV to promote a personal view of why farmers, vets, and scientists are wrong and he is right.
As you would expect, the BBC insisted that authoritative people who held a different view were part of the programme to address the issues May raised.
Well, actually, no. The programme carefully avoided anyone who could have pointed out that his supposed revelations have been common knowledge for decades, and that his assertions were both demonstrably and profoundly wrong.
The BBC we must assume, employs grown-ups. God knows they are paid enough. Did no one involved in the decision to give Brian a golden opportunity to attack a beleaguered and demonised section of the rural community think it might be an idea to have a scintilla of balance? Would just one informed person who could address the key claims have been too much to ask from our state broadcaster?
There were of course farmers, but the programme was edited to make them look either grateful or ill-informed. Even they weren't asked any questions about the key issues. Did no BBC executive actually watch the programme? If they did, how did they not notice that the programme's most important theme – that badgers are irrelevant to bTB because they are not involved in passing the disease to cattle – was subject to no challenge whatsoever?
Let's look at what the programme claimed.
Can badgers infected with bTB pass the infection to cattle? Yes, this is scientifically beyond dispute. Most of the people who are against the cull will admit that this is true. This is probably because doing otherwise in the face of the scientific evidence makes you look an idiot.
Do badgers transmit bTB to cattle in field conditions? Yes, this is also beyond dispute: the science is clear and unequivocal. Even people who are against the cull admit that this is true again, because doing otherwise in the face of the scientific evidence makes you look an idiot.
The skin test is not perfect. Yes, but everyone has always known that. No test is perfect – does Covid ring any bells? But imperfect though it will always be, the skin test was good enough to bring about the almost total eradication of bTB in the UK cattle herd in the 1960s, before the disease crossed over into badgers.
Sometimes cattle movements can cause breakdown. Yes, but that is obvious and been understood for decades. It is factored into the bTB eradication strategy.
The cull isn't working. Yes it is. According to the people actually fighting the disease, as opposed to those fighting the cull, at the last count across 52 cull locations incidence had dropped by 56% over four years.
The disease can be eradicated if farms were more hygienic. No it can't. A farm is not an operating theatre. Cows are not surgeons. Greater hygiene might help, but eradication?Not a hope. In any event the theory would only work if there were no infected badgers using the summer pasture, because otherwise the cattle could be reinfected. Obviously, this last point is only valid if badgers can pass bTB to cattle, which May (and apparently the BBC) think is impossible, but which most other people think is the problem.
May's claims and the answers above are clear. Obviously May doesn't agree. That's fine, that is why we have debates. That is why good television facilitates the intelligent and informed exposure of facts and opinions in a balanced format. That is not what happened here. There was no balance. No informed debate, just a stitch up. The BBC gave its badge of approval, which is supposed to be a gold standard for impartiality, to an hour-long piece of propaganda, which permitted no challenge.
Some important history
A lot of the debate about the badger cull and the spread of bTB gets bogged down in detail, half truth and confirmation bias. We think a clearer understanding is available by standing back and considering a hundred years of bTB.
In the 1920s, around 2,500 people died every year in the UK from bTB. A far higher number were infected and suffered in various ways. The commonest was a swelling of the lymph glands in the face and neck due to the bTB organism, usually acquired from drinking contaminated milk lodging there. This was excruciatingly painful and often resulted in disfiguring surgery. Overall it was a serious problem. It is worth bearing in mind that the organism has lost none of its ability to infect human beings.
The disease had remained endemic in the UK cattle herd for generations. It occurred all over the country and resulted in huge losses for farmers, in addition to the threats it posed to human health. As a result of the enormous burden imposed by this insidious disease, it was decided a few years after the end of the war that it must be eradicated once and for all.
The method used was simple, and proved effective. Herds were skin tested. Reactors were slaughtered. Infected herds were skin tested more frequently, more reactors were slaughtered. The problem declined rapidly. There was a lot of pain, but a lot of gain. By the mid 1960s the UK cattle herd was almost free of bTB. The skin test, which May ridicules, had done what it was supposed to do: facilitated the eradication of a dreadful zoonotic disease.
But it hadn't. There was a problem in a little patch in the west of England where what had happened everywhere else didn't seem to work. The disease clung on through the 1960s and herds were mysteriously reinfected. Then in 1971 someone autopsied a badger that had been found dead and found it was full of bTB. From that little problem the present horror story has developed.
Is there a moral to this tale? Yes, there is.
Our nation, more or less bankrupt after the war, and only using tools which were available in the 1950s (mainly the skin test that May says doesn't work) got within a whisker of eradicating the disease. That was possible simply because over most of the country we were fighting a cattle disease in cattle. It worked.
In that little patch in the west, we were fighting a disease of cattle and badgers, by just treating the cattle. Here, it didn't work and nor has it since. Why would it?
The BBC's motto: 'Inform, Educate and Entertain'. Really?
If you believe the message that the BBC promoted, bTB in badgers is literally irrelevant to bTB in cattle. You can happily let your healthy herd graze pasture that infected badgers contaminate with bTB organisms on a nightly basis with no risk whatsoever because the badgers never pass bTB to cattle. A moments serious consideration is all that is needed to see its rubbish. If this had come from crazy podcast it would be seen for what it is-crazy.
But it didn't. It was prime time BBC. That's the BBC that purports to go to enormous lengths to be seen to be telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Well, so help us God, they failed. Where were the fact checkers? Listening to Queen's Greatest Hits?
We have on occasions complained about Countryfile not being balanced. We take it all back. Compared to this, Countryfile has the balance of an Olympic Gymnast. Of course it was entirely predictable that Brian May would come up with something that was prejudiced, one-sided and science lite: why wouldn't he?
We don't even blame him, it's what any campaigner might do in his position, given half the chance. Nor is he stupid. He knew that if it was wrapped up in quasi-scientific revelations and with him showing apparent empathy for the farmers whose lives are in free-fall, it would get him further than just shouting at the camera.
But we do blame the BBC. Do they not know the effect this is having on the health, both physical and mental, of the affected communities? Perhaps they don't, or perhaps they don't care. Do they not know that in the cull areas, bTB incidence is falling for the first time in decades? Did they not even Google bTB and spot that Brian's views were either obvious or not true? Did they not realise that this is one of the most socially and politically toxic issues in the British countryside? Had they any idea that a new government would be having to make critical political decisions about the cull now, and that the programme was intended to impact on those decisions?
If the answer is yes to any of those questions, the BBC is plainly guilty of demonstrable bias. If the answer is no to all of them, they demonstrate a level of ignorance that would embarrass a Jersey cow.
Bovine TB is a enormous tragedy. Those opposed to the cull have nothing to put in its place. May's plan, if you can call it that, can only work in a fairly land of his own imagining. The situation had been worsening inexorably for decades, ever since the disease crossed into badgers, until the badger cull started to address both species involved simultaneously.
In four years the situation has improved by 56% and for the first time in 50 years there is progress and hope. The programme was designed to extinguish both and we think the BBC should be ashamed of their part in it.
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