Blair rushes back to U.K.

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, MARCH 24. The British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, cut short his stay at the European Union summit in Stockholm and returned home today as the foot and mouth epidemic worsened.

The Tory leader, Mr. William Hague, called for a ``crisis Cabinet'' to be set up and experts indicated that nearly half of the country's livestock may have to be killed to control the disease. A question mark continued to hang over the election timetable with Mr. Blair saying that he still has 10 days to take a decision. He faced an embarrassing moment at Stockholm when - unknown to him - he was filmed disclosing his self-imposed 10-day deadline to the E.U. Commission President, Mr. Romano Prodi. The remark was seized by his critics here to accuse him of continuing to entertain the idea of May 3 election despite growing political and public opposition to it.

Meanwhile, amid a sense of national panic, a counter- view is emerging which believes that the crisis has been blown out of proportion and that there is more hype to it than substance. The loss estimates are said to be a gross exaggeration and the farmers seen to be protesting too much. ``This is no underprivileged minority struggling to find a voice in the metropolis. Barely a day goes by that a horny-handed son of the soil doesn't wipe his feet on the doormat inside No. 10,'' said a commentator in The Times alluding to the numerous farmers' delegations which have visited Downing Street recently.

Critics say that a certain romanticism about the British countryside coupled with a media-feeding frenzy have turned a provincial tragedy into a full-blown national emergency. The personal suffering in this case is nowhere on the same scale as that of the 6,0000 steel workers who lost their jobs recently or hundreds of people laid off by a car manufacturing company with nobody to record their trauma or lobby for them in Downing Street. ``Those were one-day news stories, with no camera- grabbing fires to mark the moment. Unpaid mortgages and the silent drop from decent pay to a minimum wage is not telegenic'', argued Ms Polly Toynbee in The Guardian wondering if a ``mad reporter's disease'' had broken out among the media, particularly the TV channels revelling in ``live'' images of burning carcasses and weeping farmers.

The picture of a countryside devoured by foot and mouth is said to be a myth built up by the media fed by an urban romantic notion of rural England - and the fear of losing it. The fear that the foot and mouth would deprive the people of rolling green fields ``dotted with ancient trees, sheltering gentle cows flicking horseflies with their tails'' has unleashed an emotional response which has no relation to the facts on the ground. The result, as Ms Alice Miles in The Times wrote, is that ``our great, metropolitan newspapers have turned out to be riddled with rural opinion... (and) to hear these voices of rural England speak, we townies are in danger of losing for ever the joys of the countryside, the happiness of farmland, the carefree traipse around the fields and airs of Suffolk.''

The hard reality, according to analysts, is that farming accounts for less than one per cent of the country's GDP and the total workforce in agriculture is barely two per cent and declining. The total farm subsidy last year was œ 3 billions which is said to be more than the subsidy for all other industries put together.

While it is acknowledged that there are poor and struggling farmers, critics say that the situation is no different from that in the cities where there are ``poor corner shopkeepers alongside rich supermarkets.''

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