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Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover): It is not their money.
Mr. Gill: It is not their money--some of it came out of the hon. Gentleman's pocket, and probably a lot more of it came out of mine. If anybody is to pay for the mayhem caused in the industry as a result of a totally irresponsible, unwarranted and unnecessary ban on British beef, it has to be the European taxpayer. When my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister goes to Turin, he must make it quite clear to our colleagues in the European
Union that, if they do not pay that compensation voluntarily, it will have to be docked from the huge sum of money that we pay to Brussels each year.
Mr. Skinner: Now you are talking.
Mr. Gill: I have a lot more talking to do and I have very little time in which to do it, so I would appreciate fewer sedentary interventions from the hon. Gentleman.
We are where we are. I see absolutely no point in raking over the coals of past decisions, but that is exactly what the Opposition spokesman did for almost his whole speech. There is no point in trying to best-guess decisions made in the past. Decisions that have been made were not made with the benefit of hindsight; they were made in the light of all the circumstances and all the evidence available at the time. That is not to say that scientific knowledge does not improve or that more scientific data will not become available in future.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh, East hinted that all this was just a Government responsibility. I tell him that anyone interested in the future of the meat and livestock industry, not to mention the future of the country's whole economy, must come together to help to restore public confidence. It is no good Opposition Members taunting Ministers by asking for assurances that beef is 100 per cent. safe. Nothing on God's earth is 100 per cent. safe, as everybody knows.
No scientist worth his salt would ever say that anything was 100 per cent. safe. It is virtually impossible to prove a negative, and the Opposition should recognise that. Having recognised it, they should then be prepared to back anyone who will take a responsible view towards restoring confidence. We must work harder together to restore that confidence in a product that is as good as any product in the world, and better than most.
I want to propose a series of measures, some long-term, some short-term, some immediate. I am glad that the Minister has already dealt with my prime concern--help for the rendering industry, without which the whole meat and livestock industry would come to a grinding halt.
The Country Landowners Association has called for a scheme to ensure that all cattle culled from the dairy and beef herds are taken off the market with compensation and totally removed from the food chain. The CLA says:
I believe that that is true. I welcome the Minister's measures, as far as they go, and I hope that he will be able to flesh them out as soon as possible.
The measures proposed by the Government are not justified by the scientific evidence--
Mr. John Home Robertson (East Lothian):
I suppose that it was too much to hope that the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill) would rise above his Euro-scepticism when debating an issue as serious as this is for the whole rural economy of the United Kingdom--but there we are.
I start by declaring my interest. I am a partner in a family farming business which includes 70 beef suckler cows on a traditional, extensively managed Scottish hill farm. We also have a little fold of six pedigree Highland cows. What is more, I represent a large number of livestock farmers--mainly upland farmers in the Lammermuir hills.
My interest is much more than financial: it is also emotional. Like any stockman or anyone who cares for cattle, I care about the cattle on my farm. I know that that goes for virtually every stockman and farmer in the land. We look after our stock; we tend them every day and in all weathers. We take a pride in producing good, healthy cattle in quality herds. My farm's cows will be calving in the coming month, and I am appalled by the idea that people may regard them as a health risk--and that the slaughter and incineration of such fine healthy animals is being considered.
The House is entitled to reflect on how we got into this problem. I am sure that I speak for many farmers when I express my personal fury at those in Government and in the feed compounding industry who cut costs by dropping standards to allow the incorporation of unsuitable and inadequately treated animal material in feed supplements. I am nauseated by the thought that some hill cow cobs on the market in the mid-1980s may have contained such material. The labels on the bags of feed never said anything about animal residues, and we should have been able to trust reputable feed manufacturers and Government regulatory bodies to ensure that there was nothing wrong with the concentrate feed we needed to supplement hay or silage in winter.
Unfortunately, and to the eternal shame of a mad, deregulatory Government, that confidence may have been misplaced. I was a Labour spokesman on agriculture from 1985 to 1990, and I well remember working with my hon. Friends the Members for South Shields (Dr. Clark) and for Caerphilly (Mr. Davies) to press for action to eradicate the menace of BSE when it was first discovered.We wanted better controls of feed and more attention given to research, both to discover to true scale of the problem and to develop ways of achieving early diagnosis. We wanted the Government to try to eradicate BSE, but the Government seemed content to contain it in the hope that it would go away.
I suggest that that Government were guilty of serious negligence in respect of that aspect of animal and human health, and they stand condemned.
Now that the crisis has broken, the situation is being further aggravated by the Government's dreadful relationship with our EU partners. All this is undeniable--but the water has flowed under the bridge, and it serves no useful purpose to wallow in recriminations. The whole country will expect this House to deal constructively with the crisis facing the 600,000 people who work in the beef industry. Our task is to restore public confidence in the quality of British beef and to reopen the export markets. The alternative is unthinkable: a deficient diet for our people, a decimated rural economy, and a countryside without grazed pastures and traditional beef herds.
My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East(Dr. Strang) set out a constructive agenda with the objective of eradicating BSE. We need the resources and the research, and we need action to establish the true nature and extent of the problem. So let us have fewer
bland reassurances from politicians of all colours. What we need are more direct explanations and advice from credible scientists. Let us resolve here and now to follow the best scientific advice with the objective of eradicating the disease. If that means selective, targeted slaughtering, so be it.
Slaughtering can be targeted. There are detailed records of cases of BSE, and all farmers are required to keep full records of stock movements. So it should not be unduly difficult to find out where cattle come from and where they have gone; and if necessary, to cull particular breeding lines.
It would be absurd and obscene, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East said, to indulge in slaughtering and incineration of healthy cattle as a stunt for the satisfaction of the press.
I should like to add a word of special pleading, as the Minister talked about the 30-month cut-off rule for cattle going to the prime beef market. It would be almost impossible for slow-maturing highland or Galloway cattle to be fattened in that time, so there may be a need to pay special attention to certain native breeds.
I also suggest that the Government have a duty to deal with the immediate crisis facing the 600,000 people who work in the beef industry, from high street butchers right through to the stockmen who live and work in our remotest rural areas. Livelihoods, enterprises and whole communities are facing ruin this week.
There is also an immediate animal welfare problem. If stock cannot be marketed, they still have to be fed. Many farms must be running out of hay and silage as they wait for the long-delayed spring after a long, cold, difficult winter. So I hope that the Minister will be successful in his endeavours to open up the intervention system for finished cattle. That is required within days, not weeks.I appeal to the Minister also to look at ways of permitting temporary grazing on set-aside land for store cattle in these extraordinary circumstances.
Mr. Richard Alexander (Newark):
The debate takes place against the background of the deepest sense of crisis and unease in our rural areas that I have ever known, probably greater than that during the foot and mouth crisis some 20 years ago. Setting aside for a moment the Labour party's cries that it is all the Government's fault--when does it not say that?--farmers, processors and exporters out there expect the Government and the House to come up with solutions which will preserve our rural way of life and regenerate confidence in British beef in Europe and elsewhere.
Having seen the way that the European Union has operated in the past week against the weight of scientific evidence--which it has never challenged--I am coming
to the view that the two aims are not compatible. Plainly, the Government will try to persuade the EU that our measures are sufficient to restore confidence. However, we must accept that that may be a forlorn hope and that we may have to go it alone, very much along the lines that have been proposed by the National Farmers Union.
I have never in the House or elsewhere been one of the more strident anti-Europeans, yet Europe's decision, which was taken without a scintilla of evidence, has fed the growing cynicism in the House and outside about Europe and its motives towards Britain. It has performed like a trade protection agency for the farmers of France and Germany and their products. If that were not so,it would impose the same restrictions on food from those countries, which have BSE, as it is now proposing for ours. We all know that all those countries have exactly the same incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease as well.
Let this week be a dreadful warning to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister as he goes about his duties in Turin tomorrow. The country wants no greater integration with a group which treats us like that. In the meantime, the situation continues to drift into deeper crisis. We must consider unilateral action. A wide range of options from total slaughter to selective slaughter is available and my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of Agriculture today announced one or two interim measures. It is unfortunate that those measures had to be, because cases of BSE notified in Britain have been coming down from 1,000 a week at the height of the disease to 250 a week now. The specified bovine offal ban which was introduced in 1989 has been instrumental in reducing the figures over the past few years.
The Government's task has not been made any easier by those who are anxious to rubbish British beef. They range from some politicians to some people involved with food--all of whom should know better. The advice from the Consumers Association not to eat British beef was disgraceful--almost as disgraceful as the mealy-mouthed comments from McDonald's, which said in its press release:
By any understanding of the British language, that means, "British beef is safe but we will lose profits if we continue to use it." Those same people are proposing to import foreign beef products.
McDonald's would have us believe--I continue from its press release--
By putting its customers first in that way it is happily signing up for beef and beef products from countries that have BSE, just as Britain does, and CJD, just as Britain does, and have a far less stringent regime of standards within the food chain. As a consumer, I shall be much more cautious about eating burgers from such food chains in future than I would have been in the past.
People are panicking about recent cases of CJD, but at yesterday's meeting of the Select Committee on Agriculture, we heard evidence from Dr. Robert Will, who is the head of the national CJD surveillance unit at Edinburgh. He said that it was quite wrong to assume that because it was not known for sure how people got CJD, it must be assumed that it was through scrapie or BSE. He continued:
Therefore on the basis of "no good evidence", our farmers are suffering and will continue to suffer and go under unless measures such as those that my right hon. and learned Friend has announced are continued and improved after he has been to Brussels this week.
A farmer in my constituency fattens 4,000 beef cattle a year for slaughter and export. He has never seen a case of BSE on his farm or elsewhere. He has never used concentrates or bone meal. For 20 years he has fed his cattle solely on vegetable waste. Just over a week ago, his cattle were worth £1,000 a head. Today, they are perhaps worthless. Such people have done nothing wrong in their professional lives as farmers. They are the backbone of England and the future of a prosperous rural community.
"Failure to act will have a devastating effect on the livestock and related industries".
7.42 pm
"We believe British beef is safe. However, we cannot ignore the fact that recent announcements have led to a growing loss of consumer confidence in British beef which has not been restored."
"we have always put our customers first".
"CJD occurs all round the world at about the same incidence in countries that are free of scrapie and free of BSE. Within an individual country they appear to occur completely at random.This has led to the proposition that CJD is not due to any environmental contamination at all but is due to a spontaneous change in the protein in the brain itself, occurring at a random event. We have no good evidence that CJD is caused in any way by cross contamination other than by very special circumstances."
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