"This contempt for agriculture will produce a crisis beside which everything seen so far will pale into insignificance"

Christopher Booker's column in the Sunday Telegraph today concerns the plight of the sheep farmers who are about to see "huge quantities of perfectly safe meat, from animals in Scotland, Wales and parts of England.... incinerated, at further cost to farmers, who will see most of their year's income go up in smoke." The article illustrates Mr Booker's ability to see not only the plight of the UK trees under the shadow of the EU wood - but also to project that vision into the bleak future.

"With this latest foot and mouth disaster, bluetongue, the farm payments fiasco (which has cost Britain £400 million in lost EU subsidies), the bovine TB epidemic estimated to cost taxpayers £2 billion by 2014, and much else, there seems no end to the crises our farmers must endure. Most have been caused, or made far worse, by our Government's own limitless incompetence.

A large part of the problem is that farming and the need to provide the nation with food could scarcely have been pushed further down this urban Government's agenda."

Warmwell knows that each of these issues is of concern to readers of the site. The RPA page's latest entry almost defies belief, the bluetongue page continues to illustrate the UK's deafness and insularity. The TB page deplores the UK intransigence over rapid diagnosis and its preference for killing cows than for seeking solutions. As for the "need to provide the nation with food" this will be more and more urgently understood - as we explained below. And the contemptuous fiddling at DEFRA can only bring closer the burning problems of the future.

Escape is possible from the mad, bad destructive regulations over which we have so little control. There are now so many voices crying in the wilderness that the combined roar must surely soon wake the sleepwalking nation from its nightmare slide towards ruin - but time is short.