Our new Wankers of the Week are the politically-correct but geographically-challenged organisers of "Mutatoes.org", a campaign against GM crops.
The organisation (if that's not too strong a word) is only three weeks old, but for their first publicity-grabbing event they had little difficulty attracting a mob of tree-huggers to sabotage a commercial GM potato trial Two hundred and fifty protesters swooped on the 16-hectare site outside Hull, armed with shovels and filled with indignation.
In less than an hour they had planted three thousand organic potatoes, invalidating the trial. At least, it would have invalidated the trial if only they'd picked the right field.
"All wrong"? You can say that again!
Mutatoes.org yesterday apologised to farmer David Buckton, whose bean crop they vandalised while police on horseback looked on. But they didn't seem entirely repentant. They said "With the information that we had and the short timescale available to us we sincerely believed this to be the correct field. The public were not given sufficient information by the government, who supplied only a four-figure grid reference for the location of the trial." So it wasn't really their fault, poor things. Someone should have told them where to trespass and which crop to damage.
Mr Buckton said "I told the police officers that it was a bean field but they said the protest seemed peaceful so we'd better let them get on with it. The beans are just about peeping through. These guys are supposed to be into the environment, but don't know what a potato crop looks like."
The campaigners said "We now know where the right field is, thanks to the police."
I say, Crispin, it's such fun, being a criminal!
The average man in the street, ignorant as he is about the rich and fascinating world of farming, the arbitrary and deeply-prejudiced world of the henna-haired protesters or the arcane and politically-motivated world of modern policing, will be deeply perplexed by all this.
He'll be wondering just how it was that the police accompanied the protesters to the field knowing that they intended to commit an offence of vandalism, looked on while they committed it, refused to intervene when asked to do so by the landowner, and then instructed the criminals where their next offence should be.
What d'you think, sarge? Shall we tell 'em?
Maybe we've got the wrong Wankers? But then the police have featured on this page before, haven't they? We wouldn't like them to feel we were getting at them at all …
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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