House of Commons Hansard Debates for 16 May 1996 (pt 25)

Mr. Gary Streeter (Plymouth, Sutton): How much is it then?

Mr. MacShane: I will tell the hon. Gentleman, if he thinks that I can make a remark like that without checking what the price is. I am not a Conservative Member of Parliament, after all. The price of a bushel of wheat on the world market has doubled from some $3.50 to more than $7 in the past 12 months. The reason for that is that every Chinaman wants to eat pork. To produce a pound of pork one has to feed a pig 5 lb of grain. Across the world, there is an increasing demand for agricultural products produced here in the north--northern Europe and north America.

We should orientate our agricultural policy in such a way that we put Britain in pole position to take advantage of that. If we are to do that, we cannot stand alone. We shall require co-operation with our European partners. There, of course, the crisis hits home--the crisis not of beef, tragic as that is, but the crisis inside the Conservative party, with the rise to the fore of the Euro-phobes such as the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Thames(Mr. Lamont) and perhaps future hon. Member for Harrogate, and the right hon. Member for South Thanet and Saudi Arabia (Mr. Aitken), who now insist that we withdraw from Europe. The Euro-phobes are unwilling to understand that if we are to have a successful agricultural policy in Britain, we need a successful one for Europe.

If we are--as I hope--to enlarge the European Community, we shall have to work much harder to develop a successful agriculture policy. Some 24 per cent. of the active working population of Poland are farmers of one sort or another, such as small peasant farmers and smallholders. They want to sign up to the CAP, which they see as a wonderful meal ticket from the rest of western Europe. That will not work. The CAP needs

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reform but we cannot wipe out 24 per cent. of the working population of Poland overnight--Germany and Russia have both tried it. The House will not achieve it simply by proclaiming the necessary changes to reform the CAP and seeking to bring in those countries with a far higher proportion of their working population in agriculture than we have.

To enlarge Europe, the CAP must go and, for that, we must have a policy of co-operation with our European Union partners. It must be an opt-in policy, and not an opt-out policy. We need a policy that gets rid of the fraud and corruption to which Conservative Members have rightly referred. Our ruling party does not know whether it wants to be a part of Europe or not. Until the crisis of the failure of the ruling party in this country to co-operate in Europe is solved, we shall continue to flounder with an agriculture policy that does not make sense. The policy is reactive, has let down our people and has not served the interests of agriculture.

8.20 pm

Mr. Christopher Gill (Ludlow): The hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) spoke about the problems associated with tobacco in the European Union. I am sorry that he is not here to hear my comments, because he researched his subject very well and gave a lot of facts and figures about the injurious effect that tobacco undoubtedly--it has been proved--has on human health. However, he did not draw the obvious analogy between tobacco and beef. Beef has been banned by the European Community on the pretext that it has an injurious effect on human health, but there is not a shred of evidence that BSE causes CJD. If the European Union wants to ban agricultural products because of their health implications, I suggest that it should, perhaps, have started with tobacco and left beef to the end.

In his opening speech, my hon. Friend the Minister of State made some reassuring remarks about the CAP. He cheered me, because I thought that there was much more realism in his comments about the CAP than has been evident during some of our previous debates, but even after the most radical and drastic reform, the CAP will continue to be bureaucratic, hugely expensive and wide open to fraud. If anyone doubts the truth of that, I invite them to study the history of the CAP since we joined. Every reform has increased the amount of bureaucracy, and, as every farmer knows, form filling. Every reform has increased the overall cost of the CAP to the taxpayer. Every reform, in my opinion, has made fraud the best paying crop of all.

Worst of all--this is a serious point for this Parliament in Westminster--there is little or nothing that the House can do about that. Opposition Members must realise that whether a motion on agriculture or fisheries is won or lost in this Chamber changes nothing. Parliament has no sovereignty in the matter. A fortnight ago, I invited my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of Agriculture to assert the sovereignty of this Parliament by ordering licences to be issued for the export of beef to non-EC countries. For reasons that I understand--and which I hope the House will begin to understand--he chose to avoid answering that question because the simple answer is that he does not have that power any longer.

Sovereignty passed from this Chamber to another place when we signed the treaty of Rome. Ministers know that--that is why my right hon. and learned Friend did

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not answer my question. Labour also knows that that is true, despite the fact that, for purely party political reasons, it is taunting the Government for failing to give the House an opportunity to vote on a substantive motion tonight.

Sadly, the public, farmers and fishermen are only now waking up to the fact that their elected representatives--their Members of Parliament--have no power or authority in these matters. Their votes are practically worthless. The only vote that counts is the one passed in secret in the Council of Ministers in Brussels.

I want now to concentrate on what can be done to improve the beef situation. I want to make suggestions that I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will recognise as being helpful and constructive. I want to refer, first, to the speech that I made in the House on 28 March, when I expressed concern about

"the time scale against which some of the measures will be implemented."--[Official Report, 28 March 1996; Vol. 274,c. 1245.]

I must tell my hon. Friend the Minister that those concerns have not lessened today.

There is an overwhelming sense of frustration in the industry that, until this very week, no significant movement of culled cattle through the system had taken place--and serious cash flow problems have developed. Complaints have been made about the lack of co-ordination and--particularly about the intervention board--a lack of co-operation. When she winds up, perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister will tell the House why, relatively speaking, so little British beef has gone into intervention.

May I respectfully suggest to my hon. Friend that, if her Department is finding it difficult to get things moving, it should consider delegating some of the responsibilities to the industry's own body, the Meat and Livestock Commission? The House will know that that body is fully representative of all sections of the industry, and it might appreciate an opportunity to do something positive for the industry that might dumbfound its critics.

Many right hon. and hon. Members have learned during the past eight weeks that the meat industry is more complicated than they realised. It has many more facets than people realised at the outset of the crisis. It is difficult for Ministers and civil servants to comprehend the full import of what has happened to the industry. By involving practitioners in the trade more closely, we could make progress more quickly, as is evidenced by the successful meeting that Ministers had yesterday with the Licensed Animal Slaughters and Salvage Association, as a result of which casualty cattle will be removed from farms tomorrow and the backlog will start to be reduced.