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Self-Sufficiency in Style

stop the world?

part nine

In parts one to eight we introduced you to Britain's Swine Fever and Foot and Mouth epidemics and made some startling claims about their worldwide significance. 

The writer introduced himself and his wife into the story and told you that we caught the government officials faking the records on three quite separate occasions. 

We told you how the police warned us to be careful and how we used many different channels of complaint, even notifying a Select Committee of the House of Commons that there was a cover-up under way. 

They used a former SAS officer to try to force us out of our home for daring to complain to Parliament in retaliation, but the Speaker of the House of Commons refused to offer us protection.

We introduced the possibility that Prince Charles, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of England was involved - and risked ridicule, but today, nobody is laughing at the writer, St James's Palace is in disarray with a whole series of allegations, including  irregular accounting in his agricultural estate - The Duchy of Cornwall.

The situation was about to get even worse. Escalating to this very day and introducing now the possibility that not just BSE and vCJD, but also SARS, the new human epidemic, is involved.

We are now going to tell you how we caught them again later lying to the world.  Are you listening America?

I wasn't always an amateur writer, indeed at one stage only wrote the standard business letter. The stuff of a thousand routine careers.

Except that the career was anything but boring. For the crooks of the veterinary world, it was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Dear Sirs,

               Thank you for your letter dated...

The wrong place was Felixstowe.

The wrong time was the late 1960s and again in 2000.

Britain's seaports were, in the 1960s and 70s, in a state of perpetual unrest - a state of industrial anarchy. A tiny forgotten backwater was to power itself into Britain's major seaport.

The art of public relations played a big part in Felixstowe's achievement of the impossible. Spin has its respectable side too.

The very first article written for the internet in 1999 Felixstowe - Traffic Generator  tells the beginning of the story and lets the cat out of the bag - how these magicians worked their magic.

So I was no stranger to handling the press, and knew what it could achieve long before the terms "spin" and "spin doctor" were invented.

The jewel in Margaret Thatcher's crown.

It was not necessary to lie, that's not spin, but good publicity was good publicity, and it brought the business in.

I mixed with journalists, employed one for a time and spent a big part of every day reading the trade, local and national daily press.

At the end of my career, I even paid a New York tabloid journalist to come to my home to teach me how to write press releases.

I enjoy writing and why not? We all seek to influence and entertain.

Together with its evening paper and local weeklies, it plays a key role in life in the County of Suffolk.

I watched its activities and operations with fascination for many years, at one time writing a regular column for them about shipping and Felixstowe.

Watching with fascination.

Usually safe, predictable and boring.

You can't call Britain's provincial dailies aggressive. They are nothing like the national press. Closely resembling US regional papers, they take a news feed from London and concentrate their own activities on local issues.

Not for them the sex and tell stories, financial investigations or  foreign correspondents.

They are respectful of the local elites, the social order and the prejudices of their readers. They also rely on advertising and are careful never to upset any local businesses.

Safe, predictable and just a little boring...

but, not, it seems, always.

Not only did it publish over 80 articles and features, but they were vigorous and highly charged with emotion and politics. They were also laden with blame.

They went after the British government in no uncertain terms. They hounded the Minister of Agriculture for bad policies and, in particular, for failing to visit the region for several months.

Even though the crisis was serious and the exposure justified, the handling was highly unusual. Never in thirty years reading the paper had there been anything like this.

Someone was gunning for the Government.

The black art showed clearly.

And it became "bad" spin.

The names of companies that might suffer from bad publicity were being left out from logical mention

...and, much more seriously, stories blaming the innocent for the epidemic were being manufactured externally and planted where the journalists were going to find them.

The writer had contacted the newspaper with one story, about the epidemic, which as it was detrimental to the government was published. 

It didn't take an Einstein to work out that the big factory farm companies were actively spinning and they were getting away with it.

Small farmers were having a very hard time and the gross libel that "foreigners were to blame" persists to this day.

Later, the writer was to find that the British pig industry had been publishing seriously xenophobic material  for years. Some individuals had been involved in picketing the ports tying to stop imports, even before the current animal health problems.

Like most of agriculture everywhere they didn't like foreign competition much, but were going beyond the decent limits on many occasions.

Going too far.

One story that took the eye went through a series of metamorphoses:

First, swine fever was imported in infected pork and fed to the index (first) case, as a ham sandwich.

it was pointed out that the virus cannot survive cooking and British like their ham cooked.

So, it became imported raw ham fed to the index case sow by a foreign rambler from a public footpath.

that was better still, until it was pointed out that there was no public footpath near the index case.

So the foreign rambler had fed raw imported infected ham to the sow when they strayed from the public footpath onto private land (farmers generally dislike ramblers, especially those who stray from the footpaths.)

This all sounds ridiculous, but this was the origins of the fabrication that was to close most of Britain's public footpaths during the foot and mouth epidemic. The British tourist trade was wrecked as a result.

There was no ham, infected or not, raw or not. There was no rambler, just as there was no public footpath.

In this fabricated story, lies much of the origin of the passion for farm biosecurity sweeping the western world.

Ministry approved libel.

It seems as if they had a different source singing a slightly different song from the same hymn sheet. The spin was more subtle and respectful of the civil servants and political figures involved.

They were getting their stuff from the now discredited Ministry of Agriculture, but the blame on  foreigners for bringing it into the country and small farmers for spreading the disease was still there. 

Ministry approved lies, obviously.

I rang the East Anglian Daily Times. They were, not surprisingly, interested to publish. What journalist would not be? 

Hundreds of thousands of pigs were being slaughtered, the taxpayer picking up the tab and a respectable well known former businessman was willing to make a public statement about wrong-doing by Government employees.

But they were blocked from publishing. Eventually the writer found out that the Agricultural Editor of the sister company, Eastern Daily Press based at Norwich had ordered the spiking of the story.

Indeed, he seems to have ordered the cessation of the entire campaign.

A call was placed and the agriculture editor phoned the writer back. 

A call was placed...

It takes a lot to silence the writer.

It was only later that it was to dawn that the royal agricultural estate at Sandringham was within the newspaper's territory. Norfolk is staunchly royalist.

Now, after the activities St James' Palace spin doctors have been thoroughly exposed, nobody is surprised. Then, the suggestion that this was a possibility seemed outrageous.

The writer could think of no reason for Prince Charles to be involved.

But this all happened a few weeks before the food and mouth epidemic erupted and the process of spin and lies began again.

St James' Palace - of course.

Most local British newspapers are now part of large groups.

Half the nationals are controlled by one man - Murdoch, some of the rest by Canadians.

There the matter would have rested, but for Rupert Murdoch's Times who spotted the royal connection to Weston and Weston's involvement in pigs.

What was even more telling was that the original report has been removed from the archives of  "The Times" and the archives of both the East Anglian Daily Times and Eastern Daily Press have lost most of the stories reported during Swine Fever.

Most people who have studied the foot and mouth epidemic have long realised that the grouping of regional newspapers into huge groups with central editorial control has denied the general public of the full facts.

It did not take long before the same spin began to appear - foreigners and small farmers were to be blamed.

This time Chinese Restaurants were added.

An ominous foretaste of what was to come in the Toronto SARS epidemic.

This time, however, somebody slipped up and the writer took his chance.

As a result the Chinese Community were paid compensation in secret and two Cabinet Ministers had to apologise - one, twice.

The Yellow Peril - something from the 1930s.

As always, please check our facts, you are not going to be asked to take much on trust. You can usually do most of it from your computer, but this time it is more difficult. There seems to have been an effort to make internet reports difficult to find.

However, once it was clear to the writer that material was being removed, he downloaded and took copies of anything that looked controversial. The  precaution of sending all the material abroad was taken ...and a daily digest was sent to a number of disparate correspondents.

In any case, the material for the inevitable eventual criminal investigation is in the hard copy editions of the newspapers - and at the British Library.

Some relevant TV footage will be with the various TV companies.

For those with time and patience the East Anglian Daily Times should yield up in excess of 80 articles - if you can find them.

Their sister paper's coverage, which will make an interesting comparison should be available on Eastern Daily Press again if you can locate them.

The missing national news report was http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,31143,00.html

You can read a series articles on how spin aided the growth on Felixstowe - Traffic Generator.

Much of the information on this page, but not all, was given long ago on uk.business agriculture and on "Pigging It" where there is an account of the Swine Fever Epidemic, in arrears. 

The best independent source of information on Foot and Mouth can be found on Warmwell.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, a familiarity with the world of Public Relations and spin was not the only skill that was to come in handy.

When crooks and criminals strut the lanes and byways of England, they can never be sure just who stands behind the hedgerow - watching and waiting - and prepared to do something about it.

Norfolk, 25 April  2003

the world of food and agricultural crime

from

 the appropriately  named Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.