Sunday 8 July 2012

The Culling Culture

One of the reasons that it's a good idea to take public land like Blacka and Burbage out of the sphere of influence of farm management is the mindset of the farming and conservation industries. Both see it as their inalienable right to tell nature what to do not just on  a few fields but across expanses of our remoter uplands including much public land. They choose what is allowed to live and what has to die. That goes for animals, birds and plants. Only those permitted are given licence to thrive under strict conditions. To maintain this dominance and avoid losing their command and control role over our landscape the landowning and managing classes go in for absurd scaremongering which nevertheless some sections of the gullible public actually swallow; along the lines of landscape and environmental disaster befalling if their privileged management is not subsidised to the extent of coming close to overwhelming the whole European budget.
In today's Observer is an interesting article and debate on the impending badger cull. One of the better informed commenters below the article says this:

"It is about time that farming subsidies were the next thing subjected to scrutiny like the Banking industry, the media, and MPs expenses. This is because we have a system where very wealthy big landowning farmers, who are accumulating wealth, receive massive subsidies. However, despite these massive subsidies, which make the biggest benefit payouts pale into insignificance, the people receiving these massive payments are incredibly arrogant, and do not feel the slightest bit indebted to the public at large who pay them these needless huge sums of money. If David Cameron wants to see the real culture of entitlement at work, he should look to his own big landowning chums who receive obscene subsidy payments for no particularly good reason.
So the fact that these arrogant people think they have the right to massacre "our" wildlife, because they are entitled to, as its "their" land - is the pinnacle of conceit, arrogance, hubris and a deluded sense of entitlement.
It's about time this was all out in the open, and Defra stopped abusing it's public role to conceal from the public how much these large landowners receive from the public purse. Because if the public knew about the details they would be outraged.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1360998/Wealthy-minister-earns-2m-EU-farm-subsidies-department-tried-cover-up.html
So my advice to all those that want to stop this cull is to work hard on exposing the huge amounts of public subsidy paid to some of Britain's wealthiest landowners. Before anyone tries to get clever, I am aware that not every farmer is super wealthy, but my point is that it is these wealthy larger landowners who have been pulling the strings behind the scenes to enable this Badger cull. This will be the comeuppance they deserve, when the shit storm engulfing the Bankers descends on them."
So the message is slowly getting across.

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