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I know that UK prime minister Tony Blair has been keeping his hand in by launching 'bog-standard' bombing raids against Iraq, but has a full-scale war broken out in the UK without us being told?
| Everywhere, it seems, the talk is now of a 'national emergency', of 'staring into the abyss', even of 'Armageddon'. Whole areas of the country have been cut off, transport restrictions imposed, major sporting events and demonstrations cancelled, and now there is speculation about postponing the general election. Such a fever has rarely taken hold of the UK in peacetime.
| Given that the country does not appear to have been invaded by a foreign power, what is the ostensible cause of this nationwide panic? It is an animal disease that poses no known threat to human health, and is not usually fatal to the farm animals that contract it.
| Foot-and-mouth is a highly contagious condition that can undoubtedly have a serious impact on the meat and milk productivity of pigs and cattle. The British practice of slaughtering animals infected with foot-and-mouth is based on hard economic calculations, rather than concerns about public health or animal welfare.
| Yet almost from the moment the disease was detected at the end of February, foot-and-mouth has been widely discussed and treated as if it were the Black Death in drag. Small farmers are suffering the consequences of the disease. But British society as a whole is suffering something else - a severe outbreak of irrational anxieties inflamed by an epidemic of panic, spreading fast to places where people never see animals on the hoof or trotter.
| That the debilitating pyscho-social condition currently afflicting the UK has little to do with foot-and-mouth itself became clear this week, after 10 people were killed in that extraordinary collision involving two trains and a car in Yorkshire. The instant reaction among many commentators was somehow to link this tragic accident with the outbreak of foot-and-mouth, as symptoms of a society people feel to be spinning out of our control.
| | | Radio phone-in hosts have tearfully announced that 'we just can't go on like this'
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| The queen issued a bizarre-sounding message of condolence over the train crash, noting that it was 'a particularly shocking tragedy, coming on top of so much anxiety and loss from the foot-and-mouth outbreak and, before that, the recent floods'. What possible connection could there be between these three events, and how exactly did an animal disease or a flood make a fatal train crash any more tragic? Yet for once, the queen really did speak for many of her people. Her message captured the widespread sense of a national, ongoing Annus horribilis, of things falling apart, that had headline writers screaming about 'Apocalypse Cow' while, after the rail crash, radio phone-in hosts tearfully announced that 'we just can't go on like this'.
| We certainly cannot go on listening to this morbid tripe. The past week has been tragic for those on the wrong end of events. But the best thing that the rest of us can do is to keep our heads. It would help if we remembered that we live in an age when food is better and cheaper, transport safer, and our ability to deal with bad weather greater than ever before.
| Instead we hear the voices of doom on all sides, as every contemporary scaremonger tries to cash in on the sense of crisis in order to peddle their own prejudice, whether it be against foreign food imports or intensive farming techniques, or whatever. They have been abetted by a government suffering from a crippling collapse of its own backbone. Desperate to prove, post-BSE, that it will leave nothing to chance, New Labour has helped to give the fear lobby a field day.
| Those who hope that this sense of crisis might actually help to unite the nation in a kind of Dunkirk spirit are deluding themselves. The result can only be to reinforce the divisions between town and country, and the wider sense of individuated insecurity in our fragmented society. The siege mentality developing within some farming communities will be replicated on a smaller scale in many households, as the idea of an invisible virus being spread across the country by other people's carelessness becomes a fitting metaphor for these mistrustful and atomised times.
| When the UK's railways all but ground to a halt a couple of months back, in the wake of the Hatfield crash and storms, a Railtrack executive said that what the system had suffered amounted to 'a nervous breakdown'. Such a condition now appears to be highly contagious. There is disease on some farms, there has been a freak rail accident, and the weather has been bad this winter. But the 'national emergency' and the approach of 'Armageddon' are all in the mind, of queen and country alike.
Read on:
Read more on the Foot-and-mouth issue
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