As Chairman of the All Party Group for Dairy Farmers I am devastated at the news on Bovine TB announced today by the BBC. Reports claim that on Monday the government will announce that they intend to ignore official expert advice to have a limited cull of badgers. Predictions across the country are that this year alone up to 40,500 cows will have to be slaughtered as a result of Bovine TB costing the taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to farmers affected. Many readers will know the emotional stress and misery that this disease is bringing to our rural communities and the extraordinarily damaging effect it is having on our farmers' livelihoods.
I have sat with a farmer in my constituency who has been brought to his knees by Bovine TB and I do not mind admitting that I cried for the first time in 20 years when I heard what had happened to him and his livelihood. I will fight to the end to protect my farmers and feel so very angry about the Socialists' total disregard for our farming community. Hillary Benn, Margaret Beckett, David Milliband and all the others have shown nothing but shallow platitudes to me and others whilst happily ignoring our deep concerns and wilfully taking no action to address the crisis.
I am incensed that as usual we have to hear this news from the BBC rather than from government itself. Yet another leak to the media shows the contempt that DEFRA Ministers have for us. I have tried to go through all appropriate channels to raise this issue with the government by securing numerous debates in the Commons on Bovine TB and asking many official parliamentary questions on the matter, all to no avail. That is why we have no option but to go to the High Court to seek a judicial review over Government inaction. I shall be approaching various business people and sympathetic organisations to secure the funding for such a review and will fight the Socialists through the Courts until our dairy farmers have justice.