I made a return visit to the Jenner Museum in Berkeley last week. I have to admit that I haven’t been there for some years but I was pleasantly surprised at how the Museum has evolved. It is a real jewel!

It is great that our part of the world has done so much for the development of science through the work of Edward Jenner, just as we have affected theology through William Tyndall, and literature in the form of Laurie Lee.

Jenner’s empirical research not only found a treatment for the deadly disease of small pox but also was the father of vaccination. He would be so proud that due to his studies some 200 years later small pox would be eradicated in the world.

That brings me to the subject of the importance of science and in particular how it impacts upon political decision-making. The BBC recently has to issue an apology because it failed to balance the strange opinions of Lord Lawson on climate change. It was certainty a failure of scientific rationale as anyone who now argues about the ongoing threat of climate change has more in common with Planet Zog than our own Earth.

There is also the failure of the government to use any science for its ongoing measures to deal with bearing down on bovine TB. Any scientific justification for the massive cull of badgers over much of the country has long been destroyed.

This cruel, unnecessary and eventually counterproductive policy should be dumped as a priority, and a reliance upon alternatives put into place immediately. What was really disappointing about my exchange with the Minister at Defra Questions last week was his cherrypicking of data from a published report which said that it would be premature to draw any conclusions from the previous culls of badgers in Gloucestershire and Somerset. Yet this is now taken as the basis for a huge roll out of a policy that can’t and won’t work.

When Ministers start to use and abuse statistics in this way then we really are in trouble. No wonder an eminent scientist now in the House of Lords told me of his despair at what the government was attempting in this area of activity. Governments more than any other institution must rely upon science and must never advance policies that fall in the face of that science.

David Drew

MP for the Stroud Constituency