Thursday 19 April 2007

Pork (well turkey ham) Barrel Politics

Bernard Matthews is to be compensated for having to destroy healthy birds on a farm his own company infected with bird flu. As we’ve seen with everything from BSE to the hunting ban, the farming lobby refuse to pay for their own mistakes.
Lets take an example from another field, my friend’s a freelance ad man, now so far he’s doing well, but say the government bans booze ads (one his main sources of work) he won’t get far trying to claim some “compo” from us all. He’ll have even less chance if he messes up his own business and the work stops coming in. But your average farmer (or in this case super rich one) can feed sheep’s brains to sheep, spread foot and mouth around the country and yet can still come cap in hand to the rest of us for a hand out. Oh and don’t get me started on the fishing lobby….
Update Sat 21st
There's been a general outcry about all this, although one suspects "Tubby" Bernard will still get his cash. One thing I read was that farmers should get subsidized private insurance (as in Spain). Which seems just another expensive way of us paying up, how about they pay their own insurance like every other business.

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