Tally ho Owen! Tories say goodbye to Caroline
Tory MPs have welcomed the appointment of Owen Paterson to replace Caroline Spelman as Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary.
She lost her job after a difficult time, especially over the failed attempt to sell off England's forests, which led to one of the coalition's first major U-turns.
Mr Paterson, who switches from Northern Ireland Secretary, is seen as being on the right of the party, and Tory MPs will be looking to him to get Defra back on track.
He is known to be pro-hunting, and said when it was banned it was a "sad day for the House of Commons" – blaming "the politically correct lobby brimming with self-righteous bile".
Business Cards From Only £10.95 Delivered www.myprint-247.co.uk
View detailsOur heavyweight cards have FREE UV silk coating, FREE next day delivery & VAT included. Choose from 1000's of pre-designed templates or upload your own artwork. Orders dispatched within 24hrs.
Terms: Visit our site for more products: Business Cards, Compliment Slips, Letterheads, Leaflets, Postcards, Posters & much more. All items are free next day delivery. www.myprint-247.co.uk
Contact: 01858 468192
Valid until: Sunday, May 26 2013
Mr Paterson, aged 56, is MP for the rural North Shropshire seat, and was born in the county, and entered the leather industry after university.
He entered the Commons in 1997, and was shadow agriculture, fisheries and food minister from 2003 to 2005, campaigning for the dairy industry. And he also worked on the bovine TB crisis – there are major pilots of badger culling due to take place in Somerset and Gloucestershire this autumn, and there are not expected to be major policy changes. Mr Paterson, who is married with three children, is a keen horse rider, and has ridden across Turkmenistan and Mongolia.
Bridgwater & West Somerset Tory MP Ian Liddell-Grainger, who takes a close interest in rural issues, welcomed the appointment. He told the Daily Press: "He is a great family man, very bright, with a very nice rural seat in Shropshire, and he is a hunting, shooting and fishing man."
Comments
by dodgethebulle
Friday, September 07 2012, 1:21AM
“The official policy in Britain (and the rest of the European Union) is to eradicate bovine TB from cattle. This is laid out in 'The Bovine TB Eradication Programme For England' (DEFRA 2011b ). It is true that disease eradication has been achieved for smallpox in humans, and has recently been claimed for rinderpest in cattle. These diseases, however, have single maintenance hosts and hence eradication is a meaninful objective (CFSPH, 2008 ). But no disease with multiple maintenance hosts has ever been eradicated - and may never be. Moreover global eradication programmes are extremely expensive and can have very adverse side-effects, especially in relation to diverting resources from effective control methods (see Caplan, 2009 on 'Is eradication ethical?').
Even disease elimination - namely reduction to zero in the incidence of infection within a specified geographical area - is impractical when you have several wild maintenance hosts as with bovine TB. TB infected cattle can be removed using the 'test and cull' approach, with affected herds put under movement restriction and re-tested periodically to eliminate cattle that may shed the organism. But this approach cannot be used for wildlife reservoir species, which in Britain means badgers and fallow deer. Because sick badgers are more likely to get culled, large scale pro-active culls (actually a misuse of the term 'cull') may sometimes reduce the disease prevalence in badgers (Corner et al., 2008 ), but cannot possibly eliminate infections in a wild population, therefore given these facts, could it be the UK government has adopted a dysfunctional disease control policy merely to placate wealthy livestock farmers and avoid spending money?
If so, it is almost as unfair to farmers as it is to the badgers...
http://tinyurl.com/9ra96cg
https://http://tinyurl.com/9nmca3q”