WE should not be surprised that the Government has argued so strongly against holding public inquiries into foot and mouth. They have proved remarkably difficult to persuade that they are ever wrong about anything.

I suppose that with a majority of 160,or so, Labour does not really have a problem.

I am somewhat confused about what advantage would be gained by holding inquiries of this sort in public. Those who propose this argue that only then can blame be properly attributed.

This argument does not only apply to the foot and mouth outbreak.

I am not sure what is the point of being able exactly to pin blame on those involved.

During the outbreak there has been more than enough analysis of what caused the problem.

The consensus is that infected meat was illegally imported. That seems reasonable, because the disease was not endemic here.

Somehow the infection got into the food chain of the livestock and substandard stockmanship allowed it to become established.

What the country and the affected industries now need to do is to move on. There are lessons to be learned, not least how to stop the disease from getting into the United Kingdom and, in the event of its getting in, how to stop it spreading so fast.

That is all.

Pointing at culprits helps no one. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I am not sure that anyone is entirely blameless.

If any of us had our time again, we would almost certainly make changes, some large, some small, in what courses of action we took in our lives.

These days there seems to be a culture that nothing is ever an accident.

We always try to find someone to blame.

The reason for this seems to be so we can sue them and try to get a cash settlement.

I have lost count of the times I've heard people say that they are not suing for the money, but so that no one else will ever have to go through what they have gone through.

You never seem to hear or read of them giving any 'winnings' to a suitable charity.

Holding a public inquiry into foot and mouth would not bring back to life a single culled animal.

It would cost a great deal of money to add to the vast amount already spent. It would prolong the agony. It may prove that certain people, or groups of people, had not acted as efficiently as they should.

But I suspect that everyone has to shoulder a degree of blame.

If one has to handle a situation that arises frequently, one gets good at dealing with it.

If the set of circumstances only arises every 30 years, or once in a lifetime, then there is not much chance to become practiced.

Fear of the potential consequences of failure has an effect on the way people act.

Many genuine advances are the result of someone taking a risk and it coming off to the benefit of those involved.

If Christopher Columbus had known his crew might sue him for causing them stress and taking them from their families when voyaging to America for the first time, the place may not have been discovered.

We must make up our own minds about whether that would have been a good thing.

You never heard complaints about improper selling of endowment policies when they were producing good returns.

Selective memory seems to be the rule. It is time people took responsibility for their own actions.

Updated: 12:16 Tuesday, March 19, 2002