THE long-awaited BSE report is a £2 million bucket of whitewash.

The Tory ministers (including Major) who presided over this saga of cowardice and ineptitude keep mouthing, like a well rehearsed formula, "we acted on the best science available at the time". Considering that anyone who said anything the Government didn't want to hear was either ridiculed or sacked, this comes as no surprise.

The plain fact is the Government was running scared at the prospect of culling almost all the cattle in the UK and having to pay vast sums of compensation, yet eventually these things happened. They buried their heads in the sand and gambled the lives of thousands of us against the worst case scenario happening, and they lost.

Don't forget that Thatcher's denigration of the cattle food industry was the start of the BSE story. Not one of these gutless ministers has ever said sorry, even as the victims of their incompetence are dying a horrible death. Instead they blame faceless civil servants, although nobody has been sacked.

When the next election comes around, forget about taxes, pensions, petrol and other trivial things. Remember that you or the ones you love, may already have within you the seeds of a premature and agonising death, all because of the cowardice and duplicity of those who presided over the totally unnecessary, bungled, shameful, CJD timebomb which is ticking away inside everybody who has eaten beef since the early 1980s.

Don't forget the craven Gummer trying to force feed his little daughter a burger to boost his political career.

Make sure that these guilty people don't get your vote by putting your cross somewhere else.

JOHN UTTING

Westwood Road

Penhill