In article ,
Mike Lyle wrote:
anton wrote:

/All/ Britsh govts deliberately negligent? Only one government has
ever allowed f & m to spread, avoiding calling the army in, because
they wanted to hold to their schedule for an early election.

I said all Br Govts were particularly unscientific and deliberately
negligent. I didn't specify foot-and-mouth; but on that I think
they've all been both unscientific and gutless to the point of
something hard to distinguish from negligence.

All recent ones, certainly. The actions that led to the creation of
BSE (a UK exclusive - a new disease!) started during the reign of
the Blessed Margaret. I doubt that she had anything to do with it,
though, not even by appointing particularly clueless and boot-licking
(to large, unscrupulous corporations) ministers. I am pretty certain
that the decisions were never put in front of any minister in a way
that they could reasonably have been expected to realise possible
consequences.

The actions leading to the foot and mouth epidemic were nearly as old,
and those leading to the import of Dutch elm disease were older. In
all cases (as with the Manchester aircraft fire, the Herald of Free
Enterprise, the Falklands invasion and others), the experts had been
trying to explain why the consequence was inevitable for some years,
but were being ignored.

Whitehall rules, irresponsibly.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.