Jeremy Vine suggests ‘personally slaughtering’ pigs to solve industry labour shortages and its utterly bizarre

Jeremy Vine has come up with a rather gory solution to the pig farming crisis and it certainly conjures up a few unpleasant images.

On BBC Radio 2 yesterday, the host discussed the crisis – in which a lack of butchers and abattoir workers are necessitating pigs to be culled and wasted because they cannot be processed quickly enough – and pondered on just how we could fix this.

“Is there anything else we can do here?” he asked.

“Could people adopt them as pets? Could people collect pigs and slaughter them personally? Use them as a spit roast or something?

“I don’t know. I mean obviously there’s fairly different choices there,” he continued.

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His unbelievable intervention comes after The National Pig Association (NPA) said at least 600 swine had been killed so far - with fears that the bottleneck in the meat processing industry could see as many as 150,000 affected.

Abattoirs are operating at as much as 20 per cent below capacity, and it is thought that Brexit is behind the issue, as workers have returned to their European countries.

Meanwhile, on Monday, the boss of the British Meat Processors Association told Sky News farmers were facing a “massive problem” and could be forced to cull up to 100,000 pigs.

So thank goodness we have Vine, taking BBQ season a bit too far and encouraging people to roll up their sleeves and kill the pigs themselves. This is despite humanity progressing beyond the hunter and gather phase of evolution yonks ago - though some vegetarians do say you shouldn’t eat things you wouldn’t be willing to kill.

Luckily for Vine, the public have a sense of humour and laughed at his comments instead of sharpening their knives:

Jeremy Vine – the policy consultant we need, not the policy consultant we deserve.