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Mr. Cash: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Sir John Cope: No. I hope that my hon. Friend will forgive me, but the ten-minute rule is in effect. No doubt, he will be able to contribute later to the debate.
We must recognise that the problems of persuading other countries to lift their bans are very considerable when their beef markets have been badly hit. The Dutch have slaughtered 60,000 British veal calves, which of course were well under 30 months old, in the course of the crisis. It will obviously be difficult to get those countries to turn back and to adopt a positive attitude towards British beef.
Mr. Peter Hardy (Wentworth):
In a moment, I shall try to follow the right hon. Member for Northavon(Sir J. Cope), but I should first like to say that I am grateful to the Minister of State for allowing me to intervene in his speech to mention poultrymeat. The only difficulty is that the answer he gave me about poultrymeat is the type of answer he would have given me about beef up to about 1995. The Government really should have learned some lessons.
We have had a very severe lesson: almost one third of Britain's cows will be killed and turned into toxic waste. Cows represent wealth. People in primitive communities measured their wealth by the numbers of cows that they owned. Those people would have been able to perceive the consequences and cost of destroying one third of their animals. They certainly would have known where to lay the blame. The blame must lie to a very large extent on Her Majesty's Government's refusal to introduce regulations, which was the approach adopted towards poultrymeat.
The right hon. Member for Northavon mentioned the hard-headed Treasury. Its hands are all-pervasive, and I imagine that it--the intelligent and hard-headed Treasury--would have perceived the very serious economic risks when BSE first emerged. It is aware of what is going on in every Department.
This debate is about the common agricultural policy and not simply about beef. Conservative Members fail to perceive a fundamental and historic problem. There was an enormous amount of rural poverty in Britain in the 1930s. In the second world war, the Government, not being dogmatic, had to assume enormous executive power
to ensure an increase in food production. After the war, the Labour Government--the great Labour Government--introduced the Agriculture Act 1947, which underpinned the agricultural revolution, which then continued in Britain.
That Government ensured that the wealth that accrued to the developing urban areas spilled over into the rural areas. No Conservative Member with agricultural interests could deny that farmers were a great deal better off as a consequence of that. The architect of that policy was Tom Williams, who came from my own community. I wonder what he would think if he saw the antics of the Ministers who have occupied Whitehall place in recent years.
The problem is that the Government rely on their frequent boast that they are there diligently and successfully serving the national interest. They are not--if they have tried, they have failed. The same could be said about the steel industry. For several years, Labour Members levelled, justified and beyond any peradventure proved the charge that the Government were allowing the British engineering steel industry to be taken to the cleaners by unfair competition. The then Minister said that he would stand up for Britain--as Ministers have claimed today--and he came away from a meeting with a promise that the situation would be monitored. Six months later, the monitoring had not started and the Government were at a loss.
The fact is that we have seen appalling failures in the representation of our national interest. If the Government claim to have been in the lead in reforming the CAP, perhaps the Minister will tell us what proportion of EU expenditure has been devoted to agricultural structural support in the past 12 months. He may not want to give that information to the House because it will show that the CAP still dominates the EU economy.
I cannot understand why the British Government do not, from time to time, stand up for the national interest. I was horrified today when I received a report from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals about recent events outside Paris involving the fraudulent acquisition of British sheep and the most deplorable treatment of them. Such treatment must make the shepherds of Britain feel sick. As good stockmen, they care for the flocks that they rear and tend, only to see them tortured to death while French police look on in gross breach of the regulations of France and of the CAP. While it would not have been polite or courteous to mention the matter to Mr. Chirac this week, it is appropriate for us to go to the veterinary committee in Brussels and demand an explanation of how French authorities can tolerate that sort of behaviour.
Time does not allow me to go into the details of the report, but I shall give an illustration. Many of the sheep carried United Kingdom tags. One was hog-tied and left lying by a fence in full sight of the slaughter cradles. The sheep made several attempts to rise in its distress as it saw other beasts having their throats cut or sawn open. It was left in that condition until 10.34, when someone put it out of its misery.
People may say that one has to be tolerant of other religions. That is certainly the case, but unfortunately the activities at that religious festival were also in gross breach of Islamic law. Yet dozens of French policemen from the CRS, who are not slow to act when it is politically appropriate, stood by and did nothing.
Fortunately, our RSPCA officers were there. I hope that MAFF will take the information available from those responsible officers and pursue it in Brussels. If the French insist that we abide by CAP regulations, we are entitled to do the same.
The same argument applies to other matters. Some time ago, I helped a first-class food producer in my constituency to get a licence from MAFF to export its product to Europe. It had to go to about six different offices. It took 10 months to obtain a licence which in other member states firms can obtain over the counter. The firm in my constituency got the licence after I made representations. Such delays are ridiculous, and they reduce and blunt our competitive edge.
Not long ago, I had the opportunity to fly over a large part of north-west Germany. I had previously been looking at the large areas set aside in the metropolitan borough of Rotherham, similar to those which exist in many other parts of England. As we flew, I saw hundreds of square kilometres of fertile land. I said to my companion, who knew a great deal about agriculture, that I could not see a single square metre of set-aside. He said that, since the set-aside policy was introduced, German farmers had tried to grow three crops a year instead of two.
We tie one hand behind our back, but Conservative Members do not blame the Treasury Bench. They blame Brussels. It is not Brussels that is at fault. It is ourselves, or rather--as they have the responsibility--Conservative Members. I am very concerned about set-aside, because I know that last year farmers in my constituency suffered enormous injustice under the set-aside regulations. I shall not say too much about it because time does not allow, but the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration is currently investigating the case. I hope that it is resolved, or his investigations are concluded, before I retire at the end of this Parliament.
Mr. Ian Bruce (South Dorset):
I know that I have only 10 minutes in which to speak. I should like to associate myself with the speeches of my hon. Friends the Members for West Dorset (Sir J. Spicer) and for North Dorset(Mr. Baker) in columns 988-93 and 1013-16 respectively of yesterday's Hansard. I shall not repeat the many points that they made about what Dorset farmers need. My hon. Friend the Minister will understand--from the fact that all three Conservative rural Members of Parliament for Dorset have sought to catch the Speaker's eye and have been successful--that we are extremely concerned about the position and want to emphasise what we need from Ministers.
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