Prejudice rules

As a quintessentially urban bloke, I know next to nothing about the countryside.  But I doubt if you will find a better example of how evidence-based policy making is a stranger to this government:

Britain's top animal disease scientists have launched a devastating attack on the government's "mindless" badger cull, accusing ministers of failing to tell the truth and demanding the immediate abandonment of the killings.

The intervention by dozens of the nation's most senior experts, in a letter in the Observer, comes as farmers prepare to begin the cull in Gloucestershire and Somerset, possibly as early as tomorrow. The government's own chief scientist has refused to back the killings.

More than 30 eminent animal disease experts describe the cull as a "costly distraction" that risks making the problem of tuberculosis in cattle worse and that will cost far more than it saves.

It used to be said that MAFF had been captured by the farmers.  It seems that DEFRA, its successor, may also be regarded as the political wing of the NFU.