By Abi Kay
THE Labour Partys new Shadow Defra Secretary, Jim McMahon, has claimed culls are only effective in the sense that you have a dead badger at the end of it.
Mr McMahon went on to suggest there would be a transition period where the culls would be wound down if his party were to take power at the next election, but admitted Labour did not yet have a viable alternative to the policy in place.
He also alleged the issue had not really come through during the partys Rural Review, a year-long listening exercise launched last April which consists of a programme of roundtables and village hall meetings to find out what rural communities want from their elected representatives.
Speaking to journalists at NFU Conference last week, Mr McMahon said: [The badger cull] is working in the sense that you have a dead badger at the end of it.
But in itself it is not stopping the spread of TB because there is no vaccination policy in place to reduce the spread of live animals in the setts.
We do need to think about that, we need to think about new technology and the way we deploy it, but by the time you have caught a badger for it to be killed, you know where the badger is.
We need to look at different ways of deploying a vaccine to combat TB.
Asked by Farmers Guardian if he was referring to a badger vaccine, Mr McMahon said: The detail of it will be for people more expert than I, but our commitment to raising animal welfare is absolutely firm.
But we are pragmatic and we recognise we need to work with different industries to find a way through that.
Mr McMahon previously served as a Shadow Minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government and Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, where he worked on key issues affecting the food and farming sectors, such as HGV driver shortages.
He also served on the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, and has raised awareness of a lack of digital connectivity in rural areas.
But prior to his Defra appointment, he had not mentioned farmers or farming in Parliament in the six years he had been an MP.
Listen to the interview with Mr McMahon on the latest Over The Farmgate podcast.
