Stephen Carr: Behind the scenes with the mandarins

Watching the BBC2 political comedy The Thick of It has inspired me to imagine what a conversation between Whitehall mandarins might have been like following the report calling for livestock numbers to be slashed:

Great, Bill! “Department of Health funds Lancet survey calling for a 30% reduction in farm livestock numbers to ‘help combat climate change’ and ‘improve nation’s health’.”

Which one of your policy wonks thought it was a good use of precious DoH budget to go stirring up the yokels with this? Oh, and thanks for the non existent warning – Big Benn’s been caning my backside all morning!

Get your tractors out of our field, Bill – DEFRA’s got this “livestock reduction” issue sorted, OK? And we don’t need to go shouting from the rooftops about how we’re going to get rid of these animals either. This is something that needs to be done slowly and quietly. Tell your wet-behind-the-ears-just-out-of-Oxford schoolboys to put on their reading glasses and learn something by looking at the statistics – since this lot’s been in power they’ve already cut UK dairy and beef cow, ewe and breeding sow numbers by an average of 30%.

Don’t believe me? Well go on, ring Rees Roberts, chairman of Meat Promotion Wales. Last month he had a good grumble (yawn, yawn) about the 3.6m drop in Welsh sheep numbers from 11.8 m to 8.2m since Blair and co took power in 1997. That’s a 30% cut (told you we were meeting our targets, didn’t I?) But get this – the Welsh breeding flock has declined by a further 5% in just 12 months. Now that’s progress.

I know what you’re thinking, Bill – why isn’t the farm lobby blocking the roads with their tractors or even throwing a few rocks? Well this isn’t France, thank God. British farmers are a bunch of pussycats. All the time we keep doling them out £3.7bn a year in the form of the single farm payment without the need for them to produce a kilo of anything they stay as tame as sock lambs (that’s bottle-fed lambs to you, Bill. See, I’ve even picked up a few charming farming colloquialisms!

Anyway, the NFU says it’s better for farmers to withdraw from loss-making production than to keep producing at a loss. That suits “Big Benn” well enough: All he has to do is keep the production loss-making until they all give up! And if you need any evidence about what a good job he’s doing on that front, look no further than the UK farm gate milk price or log on to any livestock costing website and soak up those fabulous “negative margins”.

But Benn isn’t finished yet (well, not until the next election anyway – boom! boom!). Why do you think he brought Fitzpatrick on board as his farm minister? Yeah, well done, go to the top of the class – they’re both vegetarians! If he’s going to rob Britain of its roast beef, he needs a man he can rely on as his deputy.

So call your goons off this one, Bill, and tell Chris and Simon to button it at their departments too. We’ve got livestock numbers well and truly on the slide so when you see Benn or Fitzpatrick on the telly spouting that British farmers need to produce as much as they possibly can, don’t panic. It’s a load of bull or would be if there were going to be any bulls left (geddit?).

Best, S