How the NFU Hijacked British Science and Sent 250,000 Badgers to Their Deaths

A personal account, a BBC ambush that backfired, and the long unravelling of one of the most brazen policy frauds in modern British history

Get me on Substack now: Peter Smith Rewilding

The science is now settled. It was settled, in truth, a long time ago. The tragedy is that it took four decades, a billion pounds of public money, and a quarter of a million dead badgers to force the establishment to admit what a growing number of independent scientists, and one very angry former biochemist with a BBC microphone, were saying all along.

A Radio Studio, 2012

Let me take you back to 2012. The National Farmers Union was in full cry. Badger culls were being pushed hard. The political pressure on the government was intense, and the NFU’s lobbying machine was operating at full throttle, deploying its considerable resources to paint the badger as the villain of the bovine tuberculosis story. The Krebs report, the ISG final report, the great edifice of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, all of it was being wielded like a club against anyone who dared to suggest the science was not as clear-cut as the farming lobby insisted.

I found myself on the BBC, live on air, facing the NFU’s head vet.

 

What I knew going in (and what he apparently did not expect) was that my first degree was in medical biochemistry. I had read the Krebs report. I had read the ISG reports. I had read the primary literature. And what I had found, working through the molecular epidemiology, was something that the NFU’s carefully constructed narrative could not accommodate: the molecular diversity of Mycobacterium bovis strains in Europe told a story that was almost precisely the opposite of the one being told in the press releases.

The key evidence was this: strain diversity was consistently higher in cattle than in badgers. In any infectious disease, higher diversity in a host population is a marker of that population being a primary reservoir, the place where the pathogen circulates, diversifies, and from which it spills over into secondary hosts. If badgers were the source, you would expect to see high diversity in badgers and lower, more clustered diversity in cattle, reflecting relatively recent introductions. Instead, the pattern was inverted. Cattle populations were showing the hallmarks of long-standing endemic infection. Badgers, in molecular epidemiological terms, looked like spillover hosts, animals picking up infection from cattle, not the other way around.

I put this to the NFU’s head vet.

The response was (and I choose my words carefully here) a masterclass in the evasion of inconvenient truth. He reached for his prepared script. He read from it. He deflected. He returned to the talking points. The evidence I was citing was not disputed in any substantive scientific way; it was simply ignored, talked past, buried under repetition of the official narrative. He could not answer the questions because the questions had no good answers within the framework he had been sent to defend.

After the interview, the BBC host pulled me aside. The NFU’s chief vet, smarting with rage and visibly shaken, I was told, had informed the programme that he would not be doing any more interviews with me and neither would any NFU representative. This was not my first performance; I had done something similar the year before on Channel 4 News. Then I was holding one of our badgers and talking to an outside broadcast camera while the NFU chairman was in the studio. But something happened, once I was regularly asked to comment, then all the invitations stopped.

I confess I took that as something of a compliment, but smarted at how the NFU drove the lie home to deflect from putting their own house in order and tackling their lax biosecurity.

What I Knew Then, and What We All Know Now

The reason I am writing about this now is not to rehearse old grievances. I am writing about it because the science has, finally and comprehensively, caught up with what independent critics were arguing decades ago, and because the story of how that catching-up took so long is a study in something more troubling than scientific error. It is a study in institutional capture, lobby power, and the systematic subordination of evidence to economic interest.

Three major publications in 2025 have, between them, dismantled the scientific case for badger culling with a thoroughness that leaves no serious room for equivocation. They are: the Godfray et al. Bovine TB Strategy Review Update, commissioned by Defra and submitted to the minister in August 2025; a peer-reviewed re-analysis by Professor Paul Torgerson of the University of Zürich, published in the Royal Society’s Open Science journal; and a synthesis piece by wildlife scientist Tom Langton published in British Wildlife. Alongside these, a 2024 pair of papers by Mills, Woodroffe and Donnelly in the same Royal Society journal, re-evaluating the original Randomised Badger Culling Trial data, adds further weight to a picture that has become impossible to deny.

The headline finding, stated plainly: the foundational scientific study used to justify the culling of 250,000 badgers since 2013 was statistically invalid. The effects it claimed to demonstrate, both the alleged benefit within culled areas and the perturbation effect in surrounding areas, cannot be supported by a correct analysis of the original data.

This is not a minor adjustment to the error bars. This is a foundational collapse.

The RBCT: The Science That Was Never Really There

The Randomised Badger Culling Trial ran from 1998 to 2005. It was large, expensive, and politically consequential. Its headline result (published in Nature in 2006 by Donnelly et al.) claimed a 19% reduction in confirmed herd breakdowns in areas subject to proactive badger culling, alongside an increase in disease in surrounding areas due to what was termed perturbation of badger social structures.

This finding became the cornerstone of UK culling policy. It was cited in ministerial statements, in the ISG final report, in successive Defra consultations. It was the peg on which the NFU hung its entire lobbying effort throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s. It was the science the NFU’s head vet was reading from, prepared script in hand, in that BBC studio in 2012.

There was a problem. The analysis was wrong, not just wrong, but potentially deliberately wrong.

Torgerson’s 2025 paper, submitted to the Royal Society and building on earlier work he and colleagues published in Scientific Reports in 2024, identifies a cascade of fundamental statistical errors in the original RBCT analysis. The methodology section of the 2006 Nature paper described analysing incidence rates of bovine TB herd breakdowns. In fact, the analysis used raw counts, without any offset for the time at risk in each study area. In Poisson regression (the statistical framework employed) this is not a subtle technical quibble. It is a basic error that inflates apparent treatment effects.

The data make the problem concrete. Each of the RBCT’s study triplets had a different time at risk, ranging from 2.72 years to 6.73 years, a more than twofold difference. Comparing raw counts across areas with such wildly different observation periods, without normalising for time, is statistically indefensible. Add to this large differences in the number of herds between study areas, and you have a comparison that was, from the beginning, not measuring what it claimed to measure.

There is more. The Godfray Update, to its credit, acknowledged the statistical criticism and attempted a rescue analysis using a binomial logistic model rather than the discredited Poisson approach. It found a 17% reduction in breakdowns, just significant at the 5% level. This was presented as evidence that, while the original analysis was flawed, some positive effect of culling could still be discerned.

Torgerson then examined the Godfray Update’s own code. What he found was that the report claimed to have used AICc (the small-sample-corrected Akaike Information Criterion) for model selection, but the numerical values published in the report were not AICc values. They were BIC values (the Bayesian Information Criterion). These are different tests with different mathematical properties, and using the wrong one for model selection changes which model is deemed most parsimonious. When the correct criteria (AICc, BICc, QAICc, KICc, and QKICc) are applied to the Godfray models, they consistently favour Model 4: the model in which herd breakdown incidence is independent of badger culling. The weak positive effect the Godfray Update was offering as a lifeline for culling policy disappears entirely.

An independent Royal Society Open Science reviewer confirmed the core of the Torgerson critique, writing that the offset criticism was valid and that the earlier defence of the original analysis had been “naïve at best.”

The independent scientific case for badger culling, built over two decades and costing over a billion pounds to implement, has, in statistical terms, no valid foundations.

The Molecular Epidemiology Was Telling the Same Story

Here I return to what I was arguing in that BBC studio in 2012, because the molecular epidemiology evidence has only strengthened since then.

The genomic diversity story is one thread. The principle is straightforward: in a population that has been carrying an infection for many generations, you expect to see high pathogen diversity because mutations accumulate over time. A population that has been recently and repeatedly infected by an external source will have lower diversity, reflecting the relatively recent origin of its infections.

The consistent finding from strain diversity analyses of M. bovis in Britain has been that genetic diversity is higher in cattle than in badgers in the same geographic areas. This is the opposite of what you would expect if badgers were the primary reservoir driving cattle infection. It is precisely what you would expect if cattle were the primary reservoir, with badgers as a spillover host.

The Langton (2025) synthesis goes further. It documents what he calls a “hidden reservoir” of bTB that “existed undetected in a proportion of young cows, capable of switching on and off the release of Mycobacterium bovis unpredictably and without clinical symptoms as they aged.” Infected calves and yearlings were classified as low risk, while brief bouts of bacterial shedding could begin from birth and were essentially undetectable by the standard tuberculin test, which misses at least 20% of infected animals under optimal conditions.

The scale of this hidden reservoir is staggering. A 2023 bulk milk survey of 4,800 dairy herds using Enferplex antibody testing found that 25% of samples were positive for M. bovis from dairies where a quarter were already or recently outside officially TB-free status. Accounting for test sensitivity, Langton’s calculation suggests that approaching 40% of dairy herds in England and Wales may carry TB infection. The report describes bovine TB as “effectively out of control in England and perhaps Wales too” and “well beyond the reach of the statutory detection and control system.”

Let that settle for a moment. If approaching 40% of dairy herds are infected, and the standard testing protocol misses a significant proportion of infections, and the genetic diversity data shows cattle as the primary reservoir, then the entire framing of bovine TB as a disease flowing from badgers to cattle is not merely incorrect. It is inverted. It is the precise opposite of reality. And policy has been set, and 250,000 badgers have been killed, and over a billion pounds of public money has been spent, on the basis of that inversion.

How a Lie Becomes Policy: The Mechanism of Lobby Capture

The scientific story is damning enough on its own. But understanding how this situation came about (and why it has persisted for four decades) requires looking at something beyond the science. It requires looking at the mechanism by which powerful vested interests capture the institutions that are supposed to deliver evidence-based policy.

The story begins in the 1970s and early 1980s. Prior to that period, bTB control in Britain had been scientifically coherent. The post-war period saw effective coordinated disease control through systematic testing, rigorous biosecurity and slaughter of cattle. Badgers were not significantly implicated. The disease was declining.

The pivot came in 1980, when a government review (produced with considerable input from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the institutional forerunner of Defra) reframed bTB as essentially a “badger disease” that was spilling over into cattle, rather than a cattle disease that was also infecting badgers. Langton documents that counter-evidence from independent investigators was available at the time but was politically inconvenient. The official narrative locked in.

Why would MAFF do this? The answer lies in the institutional and financial incentives. The cattle testing regime was inadequate and known to be inadequate. Compensation for cattle slaughtered because of TB was generous. Holding cattle owners accountable for disease spread through risky trading and inadequate biosecurity would have been politically explosive. Blaming a protected wildlife species, one with no farming lobby and no economic clout, offered a solution that served institutional interests while deflecting accountability.

This is not a conspiracy. It does not require bad faith on the part of individuals. It is the normal operation of institutional incentives in a system where the department responsible for agricultural productivity is also responsible for disease control. The conflict of interest is structural.

The NFU’s Playbook

Once the badger-blame narrative was established institutionally, it served the farming industry’s interests perfectly. Bovine TB was expensive, consequential, and politically sensitive. If the cause was badgers, a wildlife species outside the farming system, then the solution was wildlife control, funded by the public. If the cause was cattle management, testing inadequacy, and risky trading practices, then the solution was costly reform of farming practices, and accountability for the industry.

The NFU chose the framing that protected its members and has fought to maintain it ever since, using every tool available to an extremely well-resourced lobby group.

The Godfray Update documents the NFU’s structural embedding in the governance of bTB policy. NFU officeholders and staff are explicitly listed among those with whom the review panel consulted. This is not unusual in British agricultural policymaking; the NFU occupies a privileged position as a formal consultee on policy decisions affecting its members. What is unusual is the extent to which, in the case of bTB, this consultation function has operated not as a check on policy but as a mechanism for directing it.

The legal dimension of the NFU’s influence is particularly striking. The Godfray Update’s own tables record a pattern of judicial review challenges brought by the NFU to prevent government decisions that might constrain culling. In one remarkable case in 2019, the NFU challenged Defra’s decision to direct Natural England not to issue badger culling licences in Derbyshire. The challenge was dismissed. And then, in what can only be described as an extraordinary concession to industry pressure, Defra made an ex gratia payment to compensate the NFU party for the costs of bringing the failed legal challenge. A government department paying an industry lobby group for losing a legal battle against that department’s own decision. The captured nature of the relationship could hardly be illustrated more starkly.

Meanwhile, on cattle-side biosecurity (the measures that would actually address the primary reservoir of infection), the NFU’s record is one of consistent resistance. The Godfray Update is frank on this point, describing biosecurity uptake as “disappointingly low” and stating that the issue is “not the availability of information but motivation.” Industry bodies consulted by the Godfray panel acknowledged this themselves. The NFU resisted mandatory risk-based trading information. It has resisted improvement of the cattle tracing system. It has resisted compensation reform that would link payouts to trading behaviour, reducing the perverse incentives for risky cattle movements. Post-movement testing requirements in England remain less stringent than Scotland’s, and Scotland, applying stricter cattle-side controls, maintains TB-free status.

The arithmetic of this is not complicated. Culling is paid for by the public. Biosecurity, testing reform and trading controls cost the industry. The incentive structure has systematically favoured the option that externalises costs onto taxpayers and wildlife while protecting farming profits.

The Krebs and ISG Reports: Cherry-Picking in Plain Sight

Let me return to what I said in that BBC studio. The NFU’s head vet was using the Krebs report and the ISG reports to support the case for culling. From a medical biochemist, turned ecologist’s perspective, what struck me about those reports, having read them carefully, was not their sophistication but their selectivity. They were not fraudulent in the crude sense; they were examples of something more subtle and, in some ways, more pernicious: the systematic construction of a scientific narrative by emphasis and omission.

The RBCT was a large and expensive trial. It generated enormous amounts of data. The question of what to make of that data depended entirely on analytical choices that were not, it turns out, pre-specified in detail. Without a detailed pre-planned analytical protocol (which Torgerson identifies as a fundamental absence) the analytical choices made after the data were collected determined the results. This is not fraud in the conventional sense. It is the much more common problem of researchers making choices that, consciously or unconsciously, tend to produce results consistent with prior expectations. This is rife throughout the pharmaceutical industry, and they are even better-funded and more devious players than the NFU

The ISG reports presented their findings with a confidence that the underlying statistics did not warrant. The Krebs report shaped a policy landscape in which the question of whether culling worked was essentially treated as settled, leaving open only questions about implementation. The Godfray Update (commissioned under a Labour government in 2024 with a stated intention of ending the cull) found itself, remarkably, still arguing that some form of badger intervention might be necessary, even as it acknowledged the statistical foundations of culling policy had been shown to be flawed.

What the whole edifice rested on, from the beginning, was a statistical analysis that used counts rather than rates, without appropriate offsets, in a trial without a pre-specified analytical protocol. As Torgerson writes, a “correction is now warranted, but events indicate that retraction of the paper is now warranted, with it left online for future students to understand how matters went awry.”

Retraction of a Nature paper that served as the cornerstone of a major government policy for two decades. That is where the science has arrived.

Whole Genome Sequencing: New Science, Old Agenda

As the statistical case for culling collapsed, a rescue narrative emerged. Whole Genome Sequencing of M. bovis was introduced into the debate as new evidence that could, it was claimed, demonstrate direct badger-to-cattle transmission in ways that earlier epidemiology could not.

WGS is a genuinely powerful tool. In the right hands, applied to the right questions with appropriate controls, it can illuminate transmission pathways with a precision that was previously impossible. The problem is not with the technology. The problem, as Torgerson notes in his 2025 analysis, is with how WGS findings have been deployed in the policy debate.

He writes that “since concerns over the RBCT were first raised, WGS has been used to try to bolster the diminishing status of badger culling in order to justify past actions.” He adds that the interpretation of WGS evidence “requires acceptance of multiple ambiguities” and that any value it has “requires detailed and truly independent scrutiny.” He also draws attention to peer review concerns about some of the key WGS publications, noting that one publishing journal “has had its impact factor removed due to an unusual peer-review process not meeting standards.”

The pattern is a familiar one in the sociology of science under lobby pressure: foundational evidence is challenged; new evidence of contested quality is deployed to sustain the same policy conclusion; the policy continues while the scientific debate is litigated in journals and press releases. Meanwhile, the badgers keep dying.

The Perversion of Evidence-Based Policy: A Diagnostic Framework

What the bTB story illustrates, with unusual clarity, is a set of mechanisms by which powerful lobby groups can sustain policy positions that the evidence does not support. It is worth naming these mechanisms explicitly, because they appear in other policy domains and are rarely labelled for what they are.

First: narrative lock-in at the formative stage. Once an explanatory narrative becomes institutionally embedded, as the “badger problem” narrative became embedded from the 1980s, it creates its own momentum. Subsequent research is framed within the narrative, funding decisions reflect it, careers are built on it, and the institutional costs of revising it become very high. This is not specific to bTB; it is a general feature of how institutions handle inconvenient evidence.

Second: the consultation veto. Regulatory and policy systems that rely on industry consultation for “stakeholder buy-in” give industries a structural mechanism to delay or dilute reforms that would impose costs on their members. In bTB policy, consultation fatigue is documented by the Godfray Update itself. Consultation, which should function as a check on policy, has functioned instead as a brake on reform.

Third: the litigation weapon. Judicial review, deployed selectively against decisions that threaten industry interests, imposes costs on the regulatory process and signals to officials that decisions will be contested. The extraordinary case of Defra paying an ex gratia sum to the NFU after the NFU lost a legal challenge against Defra’s own decision captures the full absurdity of this dynamic. When a department is paying its critics to have lost a fight against it, the capture is essentially complete.

Fourth: science as public relations. The deployment of scientific language to dress political arguments in the costume of objectivity is routine in lobbying. The NFU’s use of the RBCT results, the Krebs report, and latterly WGS data is not primarily scientific discourse; it is public relations. The test is not whether the science cited is real (it may be), but whether it is being cited selectively, without acknowledgement of contrary evidence, in pursuit of a predetermined conclusion.

Fifth: the revolving door and institutional proximity. When departments consult industry bodies, appoint former industry figures to advisory roles, and operate within a political culture that treats agricultural interests as a special constituency, the independence of scientific assessment is structurally compromised. This does not require corruption. It requires only that officials and scientists operating in this environment internalise assumptions that serve industry interests, because those assumptions are the water they swim in.

Sixth: the externalisation of costs. When the costs of a policy fall on the public and on wildlife, while the benefits accrue to an industry, the incentive to maintain the policy regardless of its scientific validity is very strong. The billion pounds spent on badger culling since 2013 was public money. The cost was not borne by the industry that lobbied for the policy. This asymmetry is central to understanding why the policy persisted long after the evidence had been questioned.

What Scotland Tells Us

There is a natural experiment running within the United Kingdom that the NFU has never been keen to discuss. Scotland does not cull badgers. Scotland maintains TB-free status. Scotland applies stricter post-movement testing requirements than England and focuses its control efforts on cattle-side biosecurity and trading controls.

This comparison is not proof that badgers are irrelevant to bTB in England; the epidemiological contexts differ in various respects. But it is awkward evidence for those who argue that badger culling is an essential component of TB control strategy. If TB-free status is achievable without culling badgers, then culling badgers is not necessary for achieving TB-free status. The burden of proof lies with those who argue otherwise.

The Godfray Update does not engage with this comparison at the length it deserves. The NFU has not, to my knowledge, spent significant effort lobbying for the adoption of Scottish-style cattle controls in England. The inference is not difficult to draw.

The Political Economy of Delay

The 2025 publications land in a specific political moment. Labour came to government in 2024 with a stated commitment to end the “ineffective” badger cull. The Godfray Update was commissioned in December 2024. The Westminster Hall debate of October 2025, prompted by a petition of over 100,000 signatories, consolidated ministerial direction toward non-lethal approaches.

And yet. Defra’s institutional position, as revealed in that debate, remains that “badger interventions are necessary.” Final cull area number 73, in Cumbria, was still active in late 2024. More than 500 badgers were shot in Lincolnshire: “in an area with a low density of herds and very few bTB breakdowns,” as Langton notes with barely concealed incredulity.

The machinery of the cull grinds on even as the political and scientific landscape shifts around it. This is the nature of institutional capture: it creates its own inertia, embedding personnel, contracts, relationships and assumptions that outlast individual political decisions. Changing the direction of a captured policy is not simply a matter of new ministers issuing new instructions. It requires confronting the institutional structures that have sustained the old policy, and that means confronting the industry interests that those structures serve.

The Godfray Update is, within the constraints of its institutional position, an honest and valuable document. It acknowledges the statistical problems. It calls for cattle-side reform. It notes the industry’s failure to take ownership of biosecurity. But it also, remarkably, recommends continued exploration of non-lethal badger interventions as a component of control strategy, a recommendation that sits awkwardly with its own finding that the evidence base for badger involvement has been substantially weakened.

This is what institutional capture looks like from the inside. Even a report commissioned to question the policy cannot quite bring itself to abandon all the assumptions that sustained it.

The 250,000 Badgers

Numbers can become abstract. Let me make this concrete.

Since 2013, the United Kingdom government has issued licences for the killing of badgers as part of a disease control strategy. The total number killed under these licences now exceeds 250,000. These are large, long-lived mammals (European badgers can live for eight to fifteen years). They are a native British species. They have well-established social structures. They are, in many parts of the country, under significant pressure from habitat loss and road mortality.

They were killed on the basis of a statistical analysis that used counts instead of rates, failed to adjust for variable time at risk, and lacked a pre-specified analytical protocol. They were killed because an industry lobby group found them a convenient alternative to reforming its own practices. They were killed because the department responsible for disease control was also the department responsible for supporting the industry whose practices were driving the disease. They were killed because nobody, in the relevant positions of institutional power, faced sufficient consequences for the continuation of a policy that was, from the beginning, built on contested foundations.

The animals killed cannot be restored. The billion pounds spent cannot be recovered. But the people responsible for the policy framework that produced these outcomes (the officials, the lobby groups, the ministers, the scientists who failed to push back) are largely still in post, still shaping the next phase of bTB policy.

What Needs to Happen

The path forward is not complicated scientifically. The science, as the 2025 publications confirm, points clearly toward a cattle-centred approach: improved testing sensitivity, mandatory biosecurity standards with enforcement, risk-based compensation structures that remove the perverse incentives for risky trading, improved cattle movement tracing, and post-movement testing requirements equivalent to Scotland’s. The 2038 eradication target, the Godfray Update concedes, has “a small chance” of being met under current approaches. Under a genuinely cattle-centred approach, Scotland’s experience suggests it is achievable.

What is complicated is political. The NFU will not voluntarily accept reforms that impose costs on its members and remove the convenient deflection of badger blame. Defra’s institutional culture will not transform itself without sustained political pressure. The officials and scientists who have built careers on the RBCT paradigm will not simply concede that the foundations were wrong.

This is why public understanding of how the policy failure happened matters as much as the scientific detail. The scientific story is, in the end, a manageable problem: correct the analysis, update the evidence base, adjust the policy. The political story is harder: it requires confronting entrenched interests, reforming captured institutions, and holding accountable a system that has, for four decades, allowed vested interests to override evidence in a domain with serious consequences for animal welfare, public expenditure, and the integrity of scientific governance.

I was not wrong in that BBC studio in 2012. The evidence I was citing was real. The questions I was asking were legitimate. The NFU’s head vet refused further interviews because the questions did not have good answers within his prepared script, and they still do not.

The difference between 2012 and 2025 is that the peer-reviewed literature has now caught up. The Royal Society has published the demolition of the foundational study. The government’s own review has acknowledged the statistical problems. The molecular epidemiology, the strain diversity data, the whole genome sequencing evidence (properly interpreted), and the simple comparison with Scotland all point in the same direction.

The badger did not cause the bovine TB epidemic in Britain. Cattle did. Badgers were a convenient scapegoat for an industry that preferred not to face the costs of reform and a department that preferred not to impose those costs on an industry it was also tasked with supporting.

A quarter of a million animals died for that lie. The least we can do, now that the science has finally prevailed, is make sure it does not happen again, and understand clearly how it happened in the first place.

The Political Economy of Waste: Internalising the Cost of Damage

To understand how a quarter of a million badgers were killed based on flawed data, we must look beyond scientific error and regulatory capture and look at the economic topology and thus examine the political economy of the British countryside. At its heart, this is a story of negative externalities, the economic term for when a business or industry creates a cost (such as pollution, disease, or environmental destruction) but forces someone else to pay for it.

For decades, the intensive cattle industry has produced a massive negative externality: the spread of bovine TB. Rather than the industry “internalising” this cost through rigorous biosecurity, restricted animal movements, and better testing, the cost was “externalised” onto the taxpayer (who footed the £1 billion bill) and onto nature (the 250,000 badgers).

The Logic of the Free Rider

In our current system, a farm can engage in risky trading or maintain poor biosecurity because the consequences are socialised. If a herd breaks down, the government pays compensation. If the disease spreads, the government blames the badger. This creates a moral hazard: there is no financial incentive for the polluter to stop polluting. Yes, I am looking at you, water companies and farm businesses, pouring effluent into our rivers.

To fix this, we must move toward a policy where people are forced to face the damage they do to land and nature. This requires two fundamental shifts in how we manage the British landscape:

1. Internalising Externalities

True “coherent sound policy” means that the price of a product, in this case, beef or dairy must reflect its true cost to society. If a farming model relies on the mass slaughter of protected wildlife to remain viable, that model is effectively receiving a hidden subsidy from nature. By enforcing strict mandatory biosecurity and making compensation contingent on “nature-positive” practices, we force the industry to account for its own biological waste.

2. Land Value Taxation (LVT)

The NFU’s grip on British policy is bolstered by the unique status of land as a tax-privileged asset. Land Value Taxation, a levy on the unimproved value of land rather than the work done upon it, would fundamentally alter the power dynamics of the countryside.

• Ending the Monopoly on Voice: LVT discourages the unproductive holding of vast estates, encouraging a more diverse range of land use and ownership. This would dilute the monolithic lobbying power of the NFU, as the “landowning interest” would no longer be a protected class exempt from the economic realities of the rest of the country.
• Funding Restoration: The revenue from LVT could be directly ring-fenced to repair the “natural capital” destroyed by decades of intensive mismanagement.
• Freeing tax on the hard work of farmers, caring for their farms and animals, and creating a better world, more efficient in how we get food, for the damage we do to nature.

If you found this piece useful, please share it. The science is public, the policy failure is documented, and the mechanisms by which lobby groups capture public policy need to be understood as widely as possible. The bTB story is not unique. It is a case study of a general problem, and general problems require general understanding.

Further reading:

• Torgerson PR et al. (2025). Randomised Badger Culling Trial, no effects of widespread badger culling on tuberculosis in cattle. R. Soc. Open Sci. 12: 241609.
• Mills CL, Woodroffe R, Donnelly CA (2024). An extensive re-evaluation of evidence and analyses of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial I and II. R. Soc. Open Sci. 11: 240385, 240386.
• Godfray et al. (2025). Bovine TB Strategy Review Update. Defra, published September 2025.
• Langton T (2025). Bovine tuberculosis: badgers finally in the clear. British Wildlife.
• Torgerson PR (2025). The Randomised Badger Culling Trial (1998-2005): proactive badger culling analyses were not weak, but invalid. Communication to Royal Society Open Science, University of Zürich.