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Mr. Cook: The Foreign Secretary confirms the extent to which the Government are shifting their position. The Minister of Agriculture told the House:
- "I made it clear that, in order to be acceptable to us, any Council conclusions must include either agreement to lift the ban forthwith, or a procedure and timetable to that end."--[Official Report, 3 April 1996; Vol. 275, c. 407.]
Mr. Leigh: There is no use the right hon. Gentleman answering a question from my right hon. and learned Friend with another question. How can the UK insist in Florence this weekend on any date for the phased lifting of the ban when we have no idea whether the conditions will have been met by that time?
Mr. Cook: I do not know where the hon. Gentleman has been for the past 17 years, or for the past 10 years of the BSE crisis, but a Conservative Government have been in charge all that time. Ten years after BSE appeared in the herd, the Government still cannot say when the conditions for eradicating BSE will be in place. That is why the Commission started its statement by criticising the effectiveness of the UK measures.
The Foreign Secretary asked whether I believe that the non-co-operation policy should continue beyond Florence. I recognise that the job of Foreign Secretary may occasionally involve telling the House with weary resignation, "This is the best deal that I can get, it's the best deal you're going to get, and you'd better take it." There is nothing dishonourable about doing that. I suspect that the Foreign Secretary ought to be saying that to the House.
However, he cannot get away with pretending that this deal is the one that he wanted. Still less can he get away with pretending that the deal is a triumph for the policy of non-co-operation. I am rather more impressed by the results of the freelance policy of non-co-operation pursued by the hon. Members for Harrow, East(Mr. Dykes) and for Hendon, North (Sir J. Gorst)--who at least succeeded in getting the ban on their hospital lifted. Possibly the Foreign Secretary should have copied their framework strategy.
The Foreign Secretary has been able to secure an agreement because the Government have at last come up with a plan to eradicate BSE from the herd. The right hon. and learned Gentleman carried around that document in his briefcase to all the chancelleries of Europe--an onerous task, and it would be churlish not to congratulate him on the energy that he expended on it. However, why did the Government wait three months after the ban before the Foreign Secretary took that action?
Instead, the Government announced to the House three months ago the possible link between BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. There was no warning to Brussels of the thunderbolt coming out of the sky, no plans for the extra measures necessary to tackle BSE or contain the inevitable blow to consumer confidence, and apparently no foreign strategy to contain the entirely predictable reaction of nations that import British beef. If the Government had not made those elementary errors, we might have got the deal that the Foreign Secretary is commending to the House today without three months' delay and the need to disrupt the business of the European Union.
The Foreign Secretary was good enough to refer to our support for the policy of non-co-operation, although not with the generosity appropriate to my attempt to develop a bipartisan line. We argued that that policy should not be applied in a mindless, routine way as a blanket ban, but that there should be sensible exemptions. We said that Britain should not block measures that we wanted more than our partners, or those that affected third countries that are not even members of the EU or parties to the dispute.
The Government blocked both types of measures. They blocked a measure to cut red tape although Britain had proposed it. The Government blocked tougher powers of inspection against fraud although Britain had lobbied for them. I discovered at the weekend that the Government also blocked a letter to Iran about Salman Rushdie, although the only beneficiary would be a resident of Britain and of nowhere else.
One consequence of the non-co-operation policy that the Euro-sceptics could not possibly have anticipated is that it has focused on how many sensible things Europe does and how often they are helpful to Britain. The Government also blocked measures that are more important to the inhabitants of third countries outside Europe than to any resident of Europe. Most spectacularly, the Government blocked a declaration condemning the detention of pro-democracy activists in Burma. I cannot conceive what possible leverage the Foreign Secretary could imagine he was obtaining in respect of the beef ban by offering comfort to the repressive military regime in charge in Burma.
It is now possible to draw up a score sheet on the beef crisis. On the one hand, we have the three-page offer from the Commission that falls far short of the offer that the Government were seeking only last week. On the other hand, we have the casualties. The Government have sacrificed their credibility by blocking measures for which they have long lobbied in Brussels. The Government have left the rest of the world perplexed, having negotiated agreements with
Britain's support only to find them blocked by Britain. Most perversely of all for Back Benchers, the Government have left other EU member states more determined than ever before to cut the areas in which the veto applies. The
Government's position at the forthcoming intergovernmental conference is to oppose any shift from the use of the veto in European Union decision-making. Their policy of non-co-operation has sharply undermined the credibility with which Britain can argue for that at the IGC.
Another consequence of the Government's behaviour of the past month is potentially damaging to our long-term interests.
Mr. Jacques Arnold (Gravesham):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Hon. Members:
He has only just come into the Chamber.
Mr. Cook:
I am tempted to rely on the Speaker's ruling that an hon. Member who is not present for the start of a debate is not allowed to participate half-way through. However, the hon. Gentleman has only a few months left in which to intervene in the House, so I shall not deny him this opportunity.
Mr. Arnold:
The right hon. Gentleman is rubbishing the policy of non-co-operation. Was it not the leader of the Labour party who said that he supported precisely that policy?
Mr. Cook:
I really should have known better than to let the hon. Gentleman intervene. We have been dealing with this issue for the past 45 minutes, and our position was made perfectly plain at the outset--that we were not going to undermine the Government's activities. We have made very sensible criticisms as to how they should carry out their policy, but the entire thrust of my speech--which I invite the hon. Gentleman to read tomorrow when he gets Hansard--is to point out that the tatty deal that the Government have secured can in no way be represented as a triumph for that policy.
Mr. Arnold:
The right hon. Gentleman did not answer my question.
Mr. Cook:
The hon. Gentleman never asks a question that is worthy of answer, to be perfectly frank.
In his remarks, the Foreign Secretary stressed that Britain's future lies in Europe, and ended by praising the achievements of the European Union. If that is his position, the Foreign Secretary must take account of the wave of jingoism and offensive hostility to our European partners that has been released by the Government's activities over the past month, particularly from those newspapers that told us that the Government had declared war in Europe and that told us--presumably with some spinning--that the Foreign Secretary was presiding over a war Cabinet.
The problem is that wars require an enemy. Inevitably those newspapers that announced that we are at war started to write about the other countries of Europe as our enemies. The Sun offered helpful advice to its readers on how best to insult German tourists. Last week, the Foreign Secretary made a speech in which he declared that the Government are not anti-European. I welcome that statement, although I am bound to say that I find it revealing that the Foreign Secretary should feel obliged
to have to announce that. I also find it revealing that broadcasting authorities should regard the announcement as sufficiently newsworthy to include in their bulletins.
If the Government are not anti-European, perhaps the Foreign Secretary should tell the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, who--of all people--said it was unbelievable that the BBC had adopted Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as a theme, because it was a German tune. Perhaps he should also tell the chairman of the Tory party, who--in a pithy statement of his cultural tastes--said that he would have preferred the BBC to choose a "bit of British music". Perhaps the Foreign Secretary should also tell the editor of The Sun.
The Foreign Secretary wrote an article on the beef war for The Sun, which was carried under a cartoon of a German U-boat sinking British ships. In the line immediately above the photograph of the Foreign Secretary, the German U-boat commander says:
"Mein Gott, it's good to be torpedoing British ships again!"
The Foreign Secretary will be aware that I wrote to him to invite him to join me in a joint appeal against that type of offensive xenophobia. He will know that he refused. There is no point in assuring our partners that the Government are not anti-European if they see that that is the type of company that he keeps. It is a short-sighted diplomacy that says one thing to our partners and then sends out a different signal to the editor of The Sun, because the other members of the European Union can see through that.
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