A single cow is stricken with Foot and Mouth Disease. At once, Britain's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown heads home from holiday. Not to be outdone, Conservative party leader David Cameron postpones a family trip to France. Then there's the export ban, the prohitibion on all cattle movements beyond the farm gate, the roar of comment in the press and the round-the-cock coverage on the braodcast media.
An over-reaction? Okay, it's clear that Foot and Mouth is a nasty disease with sad and expensive consequences. Already more than 100 cattle have been slaughtered to prevent contagion. But these days Britian barely figures as an agricultural nation. As a fraction of the country's economic output farming figures behind tourism or financial services. The ordinary citizen's attachment to the land is almost wholly sentimental.
The polticians know better. When it comes to farm scares, experience separates the British from their fellow Europeans. It will be a long time before the public forgets the mass cremation of cattle that marked the last outbreak of Foot and Mouth in 2001 or the £9 billion cost to the economy. Nor will ministers forget the polticial damage caused by their belated and botched response.
More important, the memory of those heaped pyres of burning carcasses plays to some darker fears. Remember that back in the 1990s it was British agriculture that gave the world Mad Cow Disease. Its legacy: a reinforced mistrust of modern farming methods. The countryside isn't just a peaceful place to escape metropolitan stress; it's also a food factory with a dodgy reputation.
No matter that a slice of meat from a Foot and Mouth victim is harmless to the consumer.
When anything nasty stirs in the food chain the British voter wants urgent reassurance. And that means a display of dynamism and concern from his leaders. A smart prime minister won't be back at the seaside any time soon.
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