The Foot and Mouth disease emergency shows no sign of being overcome as this is being written and so we are publishing on the following pages information from the County Council in full.

As this will take up most of the space for the newsletter, you will not have the benefit of any of my usual practical solutions, not least as many of us have rather lost our sense of humour, although it has occurred to me that this disease has been spread by this Government, and so they should also be culled which no doubt would have the support of the opposition parties.
Once that support is in place, we then point out that they are "contiguous" contacts and so should be culled as well, resulting in the entire population of the Houses of Parliament being shot and "pithed" and then left there while the scientists work out whether to bury, burn or render them, all of which have risks attached, with the "best advice" constantly changing.

The last point which is worth reporting is that Mr MacDermott has been appointed to be our Area Manager, with the express purpose of creating a system that will respond to what needs doing in this area. Exactly how this will be done will be to look at the problems, and create a system that will manage these problems, rather than to set up a system that then finds it cannot cope with the requirement.
This Council was assured that the cost of this new initiative will come from savings elsewhere, and so there should be no extra cost.

Provided that this does not result in just another layer of bureaucracy then we welcome this proposal.

(if we get more "bang for our buck" as the Pentagon would say...)

Richard Micklethwait
Chairman, Caerwent Community Council