Bringing home the bacon

I said goodbye to my pigs last week. They were back within days, enjoying an even-more-carefree space, in the freezer.

The pigs had spent five months helping clear my overgrown wood, and although I’ve raised a small amount of cash through sales of the occasional joint, I’m very much an amateur. The pigs were an enjoyable and useful hobby, roaming free in the wood, removing brambles, blackthorn and stinging nettles. They were also surprisingly good company.

The scale of my agricultural interests is vanishingly small. I live on a St Mabyn smallholding with chickens, ducks and geese, and occasional sheep, and although I am registered with the Rural Payments Agency and Defra’s Animal Health department, I certainly don’t claim to know very much about the practical side of farming.

I was surprised, therefore, to get a phone call from Cornwall Council’s Trading Standards office, inviting me to join their register, too. Trading Standards had picked up on the computerised record of animal movements, and wanted a bit more information to find out what I was up to. A brief conversation ended with the Trading Standards official politely declining my invitation to visit – his records were up to date, and he was happy.

Some might see this as an unwarranted intrusion into privacy, or an example of how bureaucrats are driving small-scale operators out of agriculture. I am not one of them. Despite my lack of expertise, I welcome anything that drives up standards of bio-security and animal welfare.

Pigs are notoriously prone to disease. More than a decade ago, I reported in considerable detail on the Foot and Mouth epidemic which closed down the countryside and brought the British livestock sector to its knees.

I am also old enough to remember the 1967 Foot and Mouth outbreak, when I first learned of some of the biology behind disease transmission – and of how Foot and Mouth disease used to be endemic in Britain, with most rural communities harbouring the illness to some degree at some time.

In those “good old” days nearly all agriculture was local. Whatever disease there rarely spread beyond the nearest market, and seldom lasted long. But it was there nonetheless. Now that animals can be transported hundreds of miles, the risks of a national disaster are vastly increased, and only one batch of dodgy pig food away.

So well done Cornwall Trading Standards. As they say at MI5, the price of security is eternal vigilance.

60 = the new 40? Fingers crossed

Please don't nuke Bradford

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Yesterday's media meltdown over Jeremy Corbyn giving a straight answer to a straight question, and sticking consistently to a position he has held for his entire political life, tells us much about how the Labour Party's coming debate over nuclear weapons is likely to be played out.

I'm no pacifist and can think of a few wars in which I would have volunteered to fight, had I been born in the 1920s rather than the 1950s.  As it was, the big war of my generation was in Vietnam, and I spent several of my younger years trying to stop it. Pondering the victory of the North Vietnamese Army over the United States has made me consider a historic perspective on how we can best deal with the threats to Britain's security today.

Once upon a time, in a fairyland of castles and knights on horseback, wars were won by a fearsome weapon of mass destruction.  It was called the Longbow, and in the hands of skilled archers it could rain down death from the skies from the safe distance of nearly 400 yards.  At some point in the Middle Ages, the Kings began to wonder if the Longbow might have outlived its usefulness.  The idea of firing muskets, and canons, would soon become a reality.

You can imagine how those deliberations must have sounded.  The Longbow Manufacturers' Union would have been furious.  "What about our jobs?" they would have cried.  The word went round that those who advocated getting rid of Longbows were traitors who would leave the country defenceless.

Yet slowly, very slowly, armies learned that they could win wars without the Longbow.  Even the muskets and canons eventually gave way to tanks and aeroplanes, as wars themselves constantly evolved, and it wasn't long before concepts like "cyber-terrorism" and tools like robotic drones were soaking up all the hot money.

There were some Kings who were so stupid that while all this was going on were determined to stick with the Longbow.  History records that they lost.

And so it is with the Trident nuclear submarine system.  A concept designed to end World War Two in 1945 still consumes £100billion of Britain's defence budget more than 70 years later.  There was once a bizarre, deeply immoral logic to its existence, called Mutually Assured Destruction, as a handful of so-called "superpowers" manoeuvred for position on the global stage while threatening to end all life on Earth if they didn't get their way.  The MAD doctrine ended when the superpowers realised that what they really needed was access to the planet's resources, all over the world, and that this involved strategic alliances with client states whose leaders could be replaced whenever they stepped out of line.

Nuclear weapons have always been beyond the reach of poor people, and in some parts of the world those people found new ways to wage wars.  They realised that nuclear weapons were powerless against an idea, and so they set about spreading ideas.  Mostly these were very bad ideas, like hijacking aeroplanes and flying them into tall buildings in the United States, killing thousands of completely innocent civilians.  

In Britain, a handful of young men from Bradford went to London one day with the very bad idea of blowing up innocent people on buses and underground trains.  But the point was that no matter how poor they were, these people could wage war without nuclear weapons.

The only way of defeating these "ideas" people was through the collection of vast amounts of intelligence, to interrupt their plans before they could do any harm.  But the Kings and Queens of the 21st Century were, like their Longbow predecessors from several hundred years previously, so stupidly obsessed with their expensive-but-out-of-date weapons' system that they could not see the solution.

I can't think of any good reasons for dropping an atom bomb on Bradford.  Defeating terrorism certainly isn't one of them.  But £100billion buys you an awful lot of spies.

You don't have to be a pacifist to want to ban the bomb.  You have to pick your wars - and want to win them.

Porkie pies?

I'd just like to make it clear that David Cameron has never been alone with any of my pigs...

By the company we keep?

So, in order to articulate views which are 100% in line with mainstream United Nations policy, Jeremy Corbyn once shared a platform with Dyab Abou Jahjah - and now some people are suggesting "guilt by association."

Surely these couldn't by any chance be the same people who once thought Tony Blair would deliver us from evil...

At least Jeremy Corbyn hasn't, as far as I know, tried to sell weapons to any Middle East despots....

Lighting the blue touch paper

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I don’t know how many of Cornwall’s recently elected UKIP councillors share the opinions of their former colleague, David Silvester, but I suspect we might soon be about to find out.

Mr Silvester, 73, of Henley-on-Thames, was chucked out of the party last week for blaming the floods on gay weddings.  Mr Silvester believes the storms are God’s revenge for liberal and progressive legislation promoting homosexual equality.

Thursday sees a meeting of the council’s usually-ignored Health & Wellbeing Board, which has an agenda item recommending councillors to adopt a new policy offering “Best Practice Guidelines” on relationships and sexual health.

I’m sure you share my relief that council officials not only recognise that we are in urgent need of such guidelines, but that they have sought fit to print some of this 64-page document in Cornish.  For some reason the chapter on Female Genital Mutilation is missing from my copy, but it’s good to know that someone at County Hall is slaving away to develop policy on this vital local issue.

Porthleven councillor Andrew Wallis, who is the council’s Cabinet member responsible for children’s services, has written the introduction to the document, making it clear that it is aimed at any professionals whose work might impact on child development and health.

As a major employer of people like teachers and social workers, I suspect that the council has a statutory duty to have a policy framework like this – but this is an area where commonsense quite often goes the same way Mr Silvester’s grasp of reality, and officials sometimes need to smuggle such policy past the politicians without too many people noticing.

The document says “We have purposefully not included a section on sexual orientation” – but later adds:  “Young people will be supported as they explore their sexual orientation and develop their own sexual identity.  Young people have the right to engage in same sex relationships , and for these relationships to be valued and accepted in the same way as heterosexual relationships.”

As I sit glued to my television, watching the figure skating gentlemen at the Winter Olympics and trying to spot those who might pass the Putin Test, I decide that life is actually far too short to do what any other lazy hack would do – and phone the Usual Suspects for an easy-quote, and make this into a story.

So how exactly did Cameron respond to Benyon when they talked about the risk of flooding?

Somewhere in Whitehall, in either a plain brown folder, or possibly an exchange of emails, there lurks a smoking gun.  I say this because some things are true, even though they may have been in the Daily Telegraph.  So when Richard Benyon, the Conservative MP for Newbury, says he warned about climate change and its impact on the British landscape (and agriculture), we should probably believe him.

Benyon told Downing Street, and other climate change deniers, about this uncomfortable truth sometime during the floods of 2012/13.  His reward: in October 2013, David Cameron sacked him as the junior minister responsible for flooding and as part of a shameless exercise in coalition horse-trading, gave his job to North Cornwall's Liberal Democrat MP, Dan Rogerson.

As Bridgwater today loses its railway line beneath the rising waters, and as its MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger slags off the Environment Agency's chairman as "a little git," consider what Benyon wrote on his own blog a few days ago:  "As groundwater levels in parts of West Berkshire exceed anything ever recorded, many residents find themselves in an awful situation. If your home is flooded, and, or sewage is flooding into your garden, it is human nature to feel angry; to hold someone to account. In my experience, this anger is often directed at the Environment Agency.

"Anyone who has worked with me on these issues knows that I am intolerant when such organisations fail.  I had a full and frank discussion with the then Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, following the devastating floods of 2007. Conversely, when they get things right I am full of praise. 

"The Chairman of the Environment Agency is the former Labour Cabinet Minister, Chris Smith, who has shown good leadership at a difficult time for any Government body. The majority of front line staff I have worked with are competent, professional people, prepared to work around the clock to protect homes and businesses from flooding. I am sure everyone recognises that they don’t always get it right, but I think they do a difficult job well."

I can't wait to see how Defra responds to my request for detailed disclosure of its exchanges with Downing Street and the Treasury.  The Independent, last week, is on the right lines.

Meanwhile, ponder the power of this landscape-changing wave crashing ashore at Seaton, near Looe: