Beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Grand Committee Room, just off the echoing medieval splendour of Westminster Hall, the Labour MP Cat Eccles stands to ask a question: “When was the last time you saw a badger sneeze on a cow?”
In a Westminster Hall debate such as this, MPs sit in horseshoe. This is said to make the proceedings less oppositional, but the debate today is a battle between two sides of the British identity – the ancient and the modern, the wild and the cultivated, conservationism versus conservatism. Badgers versus farmers.
Not literally, of course. Releasing a horde of badgers into the Palace of Westminster would cause immediate chaos. Nor would it help the beasts, given the British government’s long history of having them trapped, poisoned and shot. Since the first experiments with badger culls in 2009, more than a quarter of a million badgers have been killed, at a cost of tens millions of pounds to the taxpayer. The reason for this is that badgers can carry bovine tuberculosis, an infectious disease that can wipe out a family farm. But whether shooting badgers actually does anything to reduce bovine TB is contested; new cases of the disease have fallen by just 1 per cent since the culls began.
This sort of debate used to be had all the time in parliament, when the honourable gentlemen were all landowners who frowned over the nation’s meat output. But it also reflects the very modern issues of intensive farming, market power and political power. Labour promised to “end the ineffective badger cull”, but the shooting continues. We are here to ask the question of the year: is the government going to do anything?
Almost all of the MPs present oppose the culls; they argue for more effective measures, such as vaccinating cattle. It seems fairly clear that the problem has more to do with the modern food system than the ancient woodland. Bovine TB is not spread by badger sneezes but by faeces. A cow produces about 500 times as much faeces as a badger. You’d need to be Ray Mears to find a badger turd, but on modern farms cows are to be seen “wading through their own faeces, and that of other cattle”, says Rachael Maskell, Labour MP for York Central.
But intensive farming is what it takes to get cheap burgers on the shelves. Supermarkets can squeeze farmers for every last penny of margin and governments will not stop them because doing so would mean higher food prices. Instead, farmers are forced to farm more intensively, and the government – not wanting to further annoy them by imposing better testing or vaccination – compensates them for the diseases that result. It’s modern British politics all over: the government tried to please everyone, and ended up paying millions of pounds a year to have a protected species executed by firing squad.
Other MPs rise to express their concern about bovine TB and their sympathy for the badger. Tim Farron, the former Lib Dem leader, introduces himself as “the MP for Tommy Brock”. Had Farron actually read Beatrix Potter, he would know that Tommy, a slovenly home-invader, is a malicious portrait of the badger, which cleans its setts and furnishes them with fresh bedding. But then Potter was a farmer, and the antipathy between farmer and badger goes back a long way. The only argument that is clearly in favour of the War on Badgers comes from the DUP’s Carla Lockhart, who is, according to her register of financial interests, the owner of a farm.
What the MPs speaking don’t realise is that we have been infiltrated. There is a badger among us. In the public gallery sits a woman in a smart blue coat, her chin raised, listening intently. Most of the time she is known as Mary, but on Thursdays she has another identity, familiar to anyone who works in the government departments of SW1. She is Betty Badger.
In a few months, Mary Barton will break the record for Britain’s longest-running political protest. Brian Haw spent nine years and seven months protesting British foreign policy in Parliament Square; Mary has spent every Thursday since August 2016 standing outside the offices of Defra, dressed in the furry costume of Betty Badger. She has done this in pouring rain and 32°C heat, without taking a holiday, pausing only for Covid lockdowns. If a family member has a birthday on a Thursday, they have to wait. Two months ago she had a treatment for osteoporosis, vomited all night, and was standing outside Defra the next morning. She has become friends with the security guards. Civil servants offer words of encouragement and the occasional box of chocolates. I spoke to her outside Labour conference this year; it was her 71st birthday.
Six months before last year’s general election, a Labour figure who is now an MP told her: “Mary, once we get in, you can stop being Betty – you have my word.” She had joined the party in 2023 and voted for it. When she confronted the new Labour ministers over the continuing culls, however, she says another Labour MP told her that nothing could be done: Steve Reed, the new environment secretary, had “made a deal with the National Farmers’ Union” (NFU) in February 2024.
After the election she confronted Reed himself, outside his new office. When she demanded to know why the Conservative contracts to kill badgers were being continued, she says Reed told her: “I don’t know very much about the subject, but the chief vet said I have to carry on.” She has since left the Labour Party. “I was naive, politically. I trusted these people.”
When Mary took her protest to the NFU conference, it was a day of heavy rain. Someone inside the venue told security staff to move her away from the cover of the building, into the downpour. She was quickly soaked through. Farmers shouted and swore at her. They pretended to shoot her. “When we have our way,” they told her, “there’ll be no badgers left in this country.”
Beef farming is part of the national identity. In the 18th century, patriotic clubs were formed to dine on English steak; they wore medals declaring “Beef and Liberty”. To the French, we were Les Rosbifs. At the start of the Seven Years’ War, patriotic images by Hogarth were accompanied by verse that read: “Beef and beer give heavier blows/Than soup and roasted frogs.”
Our connection to the badger is deeper still: Brocc, the name for the badger in the language of the Brittonic Celts, was one of a few words that endured through the Roman and Anglo-Saxon occupations. There is no animal so British as a badger: stubborn, industrious, nasty when cornered. In one of his last poems before he was killed in the First World War, Edward Thomas wrote about a valley (combe) that had lost its Brock: “Far more ancient and dark/The Combe looks since they killed the badger there/Dug him out and gave him to the hounds/That most ancient Briton of English beasts.”
In the Grand Committee room, Neil Hudson, the shadow farming minister, rises to speak. Hudson is a qualified vet, one of only two in parliament. In his maiden speech to the Commons he proudly became the first – and so far the only – MP to speak the phrase “anal glands” in the chamber. He thinks that it would be safest for the culls to continue. Finally, it is time for Angela Eagle. She has, in my experience, a badgerish air of determination, and today a nasty cough, but fortunately no armed Defra agents are present. Recently reshuffled into the farming brief, she asks for patience: there will be a new strategy next year, a new independent review (by the same person who did the last independent review). There is talk of “step change” and “shared commitment”, and things happening by the end of the parliament. The licences to cull handed out by the last government are not being renewed, which is promising. But out in the woods, Brock will still be hunted, made to answer in red for a question that was never black and white.
[Further reading: Powell vs Phillipson is an old battle reborn]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor