Simples

Quite aside from the sophisticated pleasures of wog-bashing, gay-baiting and Churchill-porn, one major factor in the appeal of the modern Conservative Party is its liking for simple solutions to complicated questions. An international crisis means you bomb wogs; an economic crisis means you sack people; a social crisis means you start a moral panic followed by a witch-hunt: it's just common sense. In the event of an ecological crisis, of course, where sandbags are not required you kill things: a solution in which the Conservative Party has frequently found a certain rah-rah whether there is a crisis or not. In the case of bovine tuberculosis, the ongoing badger cull has proved so effective that the Government refuses to release any figures; hence mere experts and other trouble-makers are making noises about local ecologies becoming unbalanced. It seems that stoats, weasels and foxes may be moving in and causing unforeseen consequences, despite the Government's apparently not having bothered to foresee any consequences on the grounds that it would mean throwing money at mere experts who might then disagree with the Government. Since the Department of the Environment is now headed by the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, we may no doubt look forward to such innovative, radical yet common-sense solutions as fox-hunts utilising Serco detainees in place of hounds; compulsory mustelid quotas for primary-school children; and fire-proofing tower-blocks by packing them in weasel meat.