| Review of: | The Politics of BSE by Richard Packer |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | James Cornford |
| Reviewed in: | The Political Quarterly |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 77, Issue 4, Pages 501-520 |
Crazy cows: an inquest
Richard Packer was Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), as it was then called, from 1993 to 2000, the senior official at the height of the BSE crisis and its aftermath. He had also been involved earlier, but less directly, with related matters as a MAFF official dealing with the European Union. No one has a more continuous and intimate knowledge of how and why the BSE crisis unfolded as it did. Even keen observers of politics may have forgotten the extent of the crisis, the strength of the public reaction, the suspicion of government malfeasance, especially at MAFF, and the fervent desire on the part of politicians, commentators and campaigners to find somebody to blame. Packer was a prime suspect and it is easy to see why. From his book, he emerges as a Roundhead-able, honest, stubborn, plain spoken and a strong believer in doing things by the book. In short, he is no courtier. He gives a revealing glimpse of his style in a brief account of his dealings with the incoming ministers to his department in 1997, when he threatened them with an Accounting Officer Direction over the siting of a new MAFF facility. He found a proper way of relenting, which a more supple (or pliant?) official might have done without the row. Despite the damage to his relationships with the ministers, he still thinks that his action was salutary (for them) and takes some satisfaction from it.
The aim of the book is to restore balance and proportion to the picture of BSE that emerged from parliamentary debate, television and newspaper coverage and commentary, and to a lesser extent from the report of the Inquiry set up in 1997 to look into the events leading up to 20 March 1996. This was the day when SEAC, the government's independent scientific advisory committee on BSE, changed its mind about the transmissibility of the disease from cattle to humans, and the storm broke. Packer's story falls into two halves. The first is a detailed account of developments before 1996 and of the report of the Inquiry into them. This reads rather like an official paper, lit by occasional flashes of anger and contempt-neither stylish nor eloquent, but a good, clear, painstaking exposition of difficult matters. In dealing with the Inquiry, Packer goes into detail in rebutting what may be called secondary criticisms, but accepts, with some surprise and relief, the main findings. His chief complaint is that these findings, which largely exonerated the government and MAFF from the most damaging allegations commonly made against them, did not receive anything like the coverage that its criticisms did. He thinks that this may have been partly because of the procedures initially adopted by the Inquiry and by the way in which its report was presented. Whether the search for scapegoats could ever have been diverted is another matter. It may, however, be worth recalling some of the conclusions of the Inquiry in which Packer takes comfort and that received precious little attention at the time:
In the years up to March 1996 most of those responsible for responding to the challenge of BSE emerge with credit ...
At the heart of the BSE story lie questions of how to handle hazard - a known hazard to cattle and an unknown hazard to humans. The Government took measures to address both hazards. They were sensible measures ...
The rigour with which policy measures were implemented for the protection of human health was aected by the belief of many prior to early 1996 that BSE was not a potential threat to human life.
In dealing with BSE, it was not MAFF's policy to lean in favour of the agricultural producers to the detriment of the consumer.
The Government introduced measures to guard against the risk that BSE might be a matter of life and death for cattle but also for human beings ...
The Government did not lie to the public about BSE. It believed that the risks posed by BSE to humans were remote ...
So far, so good. The conclusions with which Packer is less happy concern delays in the implementation of new regulatory measures and failures of communication with the public. On the first, his main complaint is hindsight. Before 1996, BSE simply did not have the salience and priority that would have made it possible to speed up better regulation, particularly measures to deal with the effective inspection of slaughterhouses, which Packer accepts as the major systemic failure. Packer argues that the political climate both in Whitehall and in Westminster at the time made measures involving further regulation of industry and/or subsidy to agriculture difficult to achieve in the absence of unambiguous scientific advice on threats to human health. This is certainly plausible. I am less comfortable with examples from the 'real world' of Whitehall; for instance, a passage in which Packer chides Sir Richard Southwood, chairman of a predecessor of SEAC, for being 'naive and unwise' in trying to get into a report at a late stage a recommendation against the feeding of ruminant protein to ruminants. The objection is that Southwood tried to bounce MAFF, despite the fact that he had identified a basic scientific explanation for the occurrence of BSE before anybody else and saw that it raised important questions about agricultural practice. Were Southwood's tactics so grievously wrong that MAFF was justified in watering down the recommendation?
The question of communicating with the public on matters of risk or hazard is indeed a difficult one. In general, Packer is scornful of those who advocate openness as a panacea, although he accepts that it must now be adopted as a policy both for reasons of informed consent and to maintain trust or overcome suspicion. He is right to say that openness will not of itself resolve problems of policy, and perhaps especially those that involve risk, doubt or uncertainty. The world is divided between those who are trained to think probabilistically and a much larger number who are not. And in any event what is regarded as an acceptable risk varies from case to case and between high-risk/low-impact and low-risk/high-impact events-say, between traffic and nuclear accidents. Matters affecting food and human health are particularly sensitive, but Packer points to several instances in which the public reaction was the reverse of what was expected and feared. The difficulty is when to say what and how, under conditions of uncertainty, which are extended in the case of BSE by the long incubation period of the disease and the absence of a test for early infection. When asked whether X is safe, the scientists must always point out the gaps in knowledge and the need for solid research results before they can give a definite answer. In the absence of clear scientific advice, officials are bound to say that there is insufficient evidence to say that X is not safe and should be banned or regulated to the detriment of existing interests at either the public or private expense or both. Packer points to the difficulty for a minister, when asked whether or not it is safe to eat beef, to answer 'probably'. When, in March 1996, the scientific advice on the danger to humans from BSE changed from remote to present, it was impossible in the ensuing uproar to get across the message that measures were already in place to reduce that risk to an acceptable level, if indeed there was one.
The second half of the book deals with the aftermath: the public crisis of confidence, the political response and the ensuing rows with the EU. Although Packer continues to pile on the detail, as he often must to make his case, this part is fresher (not ground covered by the Inquiry) and livelier. He gives vent to his views on ministers and colleagues in terms that might have created a sensation had we not already been exposed to the Scott, Hutton and Butler inquiries. The crisis could not have come at a worse time for the Conservative government, deeply divided on Europe and already holed below the waterline by expulsion from the ERM. As Ian Gilmour once mordantly remarked, the Conservative party never panics except in a crisis. And this was a crisis. From Packer's perspective, its two worst features were, firstly, a breakdown in the established procedures of Cabinet government-
On the wider impact of the BSE crisis, Packer is downbeat-and he is probably right. Changes in attitudes to the release of official information, the decrease in public deference to persons in authority, the erosion of Cabinet government, the waning of Parliament and the withering away of the parties outside Parliament, the quasi-presidential style of government that television has encouraged-all these were in train anyway. Will Packer succeed in his attempt to rescue MAFF from the presumption of guilt? I doubt it, valiantly as he has laboured. If the Inquiry could not lift the burden five years ago, it is too late now. But his book will remain a prime source for understanding BSE and, more generally, for the study of policy-making under pressure.
My own conclusions are as follows: bring back bureaucracy and become a vegetarian.