Within days of the discovery of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) on a farm in Northumberland, my route home through Clissold Park in Stoke Newington was blocked by a barrier. A notice explained that, as a 'precautionary measure', an exclusion zone had been declared around a small compound in the park containing a few deer, to prevent them from catching FMD from the public.
|
This measure - like the cancellation of sporting events, universal bans on rambling and other similar gestures - revealed the spread of a panic much more contagious than the virus that causes FMD.
|
As the bemused response of veterinary authorities to these symbolic cordons sanitaires confirms, they have no value in deterring the spread of FMD. Clissold Park is surrounded by urban sprawl for 10 miles in all directions, and its mangy deer are at negligible risk of catching FMD from a local population that is as remote from the world of farming as Tony Blair is from the world of foxhunting.
|
Yet Hackney council, a local authority that is incapable of providing decent social services, education, housing - or even of cleaning the streets - moved with unprecedented speed and efficiency to proclaim its commitment to the cause of national unity against FMD.
|
As FMD has spread and the panic intensified, further symbolic measures have been introduced with a level of earnestness that demands compliance, however absurd the precaution. (How is the epidemic deterred by airline passengers shuffling through trays of disinfectant?) But, like Hackney council, authorities in every field of national life are keen to display their concern about the epidemic. And the public, sensitive to the rising pitch of moral fervour, readily responds to appeals for restraint and sacrifice.
|
While farmers take the familiar practical steps necessary to contain an epidemic that is clearly a serious threat to livestock and to food production, the FMD panic has acquired a life of its own, reaching far beyond the world of agriculture.
|
It seems that the FMD virus is more the occasion of this panic than its real cause, and that the panic is driven by much wider social and political forces. Hence the mood of national emergency rapidly incorporated the Selby rail crash and the snowstorms, and moved on to include the latest scare about overhead electricity cables causing cancer in children.
|
The contrast between the current outbreak of FMD and the last major epidemic in the winter of 1967-68 is striking. Though the current outbreak may well turn out to be much smaller, it has already had a vastly greater political impact.
|
If you want to find out about the 1967 outbreak, you will have to turn to veterinary or agricultural sources. You will certainly find little information in the social and political histories of the 1960s. For example, Harold Wilson's 1000-page diaries of the 1964-1970 governments include one brief paragraph on FMD (Tony Benn's diaries for the same period ignore it completely).
|
On the other hand, these books record a government preoccupied with economic policy (devaluation), trade union militancy and factional strife within the Labour Party, and on the international front, with the USA and the Soviet Union, Vietnam and South Africa. At a time when demonstrations against the Vietnam War and protests around issues of women's liberation and black power were gathering momentum in the UK and other Western countries, there was little interest in FMD, farming or food policy.
|
Today, a government with a much bigger majority, presiding over a much stronger economy, treats a minor outbreak of FMD as a national catastrophe on such a scale that it may necessitate delaying the date of the general election. For New Labour, the lesson of the BSE crisis, codified in its recent response to the Phillips report, is that, far from trying to contain any health scare that arises, it should seize the opportunity to promote it (1).
|
Instead of deploying scientific expertise to provide a lead to public opinion, the government's new role is merely to provide the information and let the public decide. Whereas once the role of government was to prevent panic, now it tries to promote it.
|
The FMD crisis exposes the insecurity of the government, but it also provides it with a means of regaining authority over society. By encouraging a heightened awareness of the risks associated with food production - and with other aspects of everyday life - the government indicates its identification with the preoccupations of at least a section of the public. It also encourages a spirit of caution and restraint in people's private lives, which has a generally conservative impact.
|
In this way New Labour pursues the strategy of Third Way guru Anthony Giddens, who particularly recommends the moral value of risk awareness:
|
'We can't return to nature or to tradition, but we can seek to remoralise our lives in the context of a positive acceptance of manufactured uncertainty.' (2)
|
Yet it is worth noting that, while contemporary scaremongers emphasise the danger of 'manufactured uncertainty' - risks arising from human intervention in nature rather than from nature itself - the current crisis arises from an ancient virus rather than from some new genetically modified agent, the great bogey of environmentalists.
|
It remains unclear whether the FMD panic will lead to postponement of the general election. It is already clear that, whatever the cost to agriculture, the panic will encourage the reduction of politics to issues of health and safety - which is one of New Labour's key contributions to the life of the nation.
|
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is the author of MMR and Autism, Routledge, 2004 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); and The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle, Routledge, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon UK or Amazon USA). He is also a contributor to Alternative Medicine: Should We Swallow It? Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
Read on:
Read more on the Foot-and-mouth issue
(1) See Second Opinion, 13 February
(2) Beyond Right and Left: The Future of Radical Politics, Anthony Giddens, Polity 1994, p227. Buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)
|
