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Mr. Matthew Taylor (Truro): The situation surrounding the 30-month scheme is dire in the south-west--I have no reason to believe that that is not the case elsewhere. Farmers in Devon and Cornwall are unable to get cattle slaughtered, and the numbers are piling up because of a lack of capacity--even though there is capacity in areas that do not need it. That must be sorted out.
Will my hon. Friend comment on the fact that the allocation of numbers appears to cater to big business interests--the big abattoirs and the big renderers--and bears little relation to the needs on the ground or to the long-term future of the industry? There appears to be an attempt to close many of the independent abattoirs.
Mr. Tyler:
I agree with my hon. Friend. I believe that there may be a hidden agenda. Now that Ministers' attention has been drawn to that by hon. Members, I hope that they will give it urgent attention.
There is a direct mismatch between the area-by-area needs of the industry and the provision of slaughter and processing capacity. There is another mismatch--to which hon. Members who spoke in the previous debate will wish to return. Auctioneers are finding that the proportion of cull cows and clean cattle that will go through livestock markets is not what was promised at the outset. I hope that the Minister will give us a guarantee that future allocations will offset the previous discrepancies. There has been little equity and little efficiency so far.
What are we achieving? Naturally, there is continuing concern within and outside rural areas about the basic scientific hypothesis and the health considerations on which the Minister and his colleagues took their original decisions. I note that there has been no substantial dissent from an article that appeared in the British Medical Journal on 30 March 1996, headed "BSE and CJD--The link is unproved, but no better explanation is presently forthcoming." The article stated:
Last week, I asked a Health Minister a specific question and I got a specific answer. He told me that 10 out of the 20 younger victims of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease--the human version of BSE--had been undergoing growth hormone treatment. That is 50 per cent. Unlike so many
of the statistics that link CJD to farming methods, that is highly significant and should be at the centre of ministerial attention. However, by then Ministers and the media were well on their mad cow trip. It is always easier to blame someone else.
The right hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Jopling) suggested that the wording of our motion personalised our attack on the Ministry. All hon. Members know that that is the proper parliamentary way to proceed. On a previous occasion, the Minister was kind enough to apologise for not being able to be present. I understand his absence today and I do not read anything into it.
However, I had much higher hopes of the Minister's stewardship of his Department. I made a speech on 10 April and suggested that the Minister should not be made a scapegoat. I thought that there would be a reasonable chance that he would be able to do better than his predecessors and his colleagues, and that he would not make an even worse mess than they had already created. It seemed that the collective incompetence of the Government was being unfairly offloaded on to the Minister. The snide comments of some of his colleagues--in the Texan phrase, that he was "all hat and no cows"--seemed to be premature. I admit that I was over-optimistic.
Clearly, the Prime Minister agrees with me. Why else did he appoint the Foreign Secretary to take over the Minister's negotiating role abroad and appoint the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to take over the direction of the BSE eradication programme at home? The Prime Minister must believe that the Minister was not up to the job. I hope that the Prime Minister will, for once, act logically and join hon. Members in demanding that Ministers take full responsibility for their Departments.
Yesterday, I was reminded by a former civil servant that it was over an agricultural issue that a Minister--the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Mrs. Currie)--last resigned, because she felt that she had let down her Department and that her Department had let down the nation. Indeed, a former Minister of Agriculture resigned over the Crichel Down affair and established that precedent.
The long-suffering beef and dairy industry--those connected with the industry have had their livelihoods put at risk over the past 13 nightmare weeks--should at least have the satisfaction of knowing that someone is accountable to the House for the disaster.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Before I call the Minister to move the amendment, I must announce that Madam Speaker has decreed that speeches between 7 and 9 pm shall be restricted to 10 minutes.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. Tony Baldry):
I beg to move, to leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:
My right hon. and learned Friend is not here because he is in Luxembourg attending the most important Agriculture Council meeting of the year. He is negotiating the common agricultural policy price fixing and working to get the best deal for British farmers, including specialist beef producers. If the hon. Member for North Cornwall had been out and about talking to as many farmers as me, he would be aware that specialist beef producers want not sanctimonious speeches in this place but action. That is what they will get in Luxembourg.
What are the grounds for the hon. Gentleman's attacks on my right hon. and learned Friend? Are they that he is a dishonourable man? Most of us know that my right hon. and learned Friend is one of the most honourable and decent Members of the House. Throughout the crisis, he has remained above personal attacks and mudslinging. He has worked flat out for three months to try to resolve the crisis and to secure a future for our beef industry.
Perhaps the hon. Member for North Cornwall believes that my right hon. and learned Friend concealed vital information from the public or from the House. No: my right hon. and learned Friend and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health came to the House with new scientific advice about bovine spongiform encephalopathy within hours of receiving it from the spongiform encephalopathy advisory committee. In the latter part of his speech, the hon. Gentleman seemed to suggest that the Liberal party knows more about BSE than SEAC. Of course, the Liberals--who are craven servants of federalism--say that we should have gone to Brussels first. I do not believe that the House would or should have tolerated such a move. Ministers are accountable to the House first and last.
What else is my right hon. and learned Friend supposed to have got wrong? It is alleged that he misled the public about our plans for a selective cull. The media may have misled the public, but my right hon. and learned Friend certainly did not. I have a transcript of the interview that he gave to the "On the Record" programme four days after he reported to the House. I shall read what he said when he was asked which animals the Government were considering culling, and I shall ensure that a copy of the transcript is placed in the Library so that hon. Members can check the veracity of my quotation. My right hon. and learned Friend said:
Mr. Baldry:
I must make some progress. The Liberal Democrats have been dishing up dirt for the past 40 minutes; they must now hear the facts.
The Times carried the headline,
"the link to cattle products is itself only a presumption; how ironic, for example, if 11 million British cattle should be slaughtered in a pre-emptive strike to eliminate the risk of zoonotic CJD, only to find belatedly that the true villains were pigs or chickens which were also fed contaminated nutritional supplements but were brought to market at such a young age that the disease had not had time to become manifest."
No one has disputed that view. What does the Minister say? After the record of ministerial and official scientific advice on the issue in recent years, are we to believe what the Minister says anyway?
5.29 pm
'congratulates the Government on securing a clear framework for the lifting of the European ban on British beef; welcomes the package of support the Government has provided to the beef industry over the last three months; and urges the Liberal Democrat Party to work with the Government to restore confidence in British beef instead of carping and criticising from the sidelines.'.
I believe that the debate is a disgrace. The Liberal Democrats--particularly the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler)--have dragged proceedings in the
House to a new low. We have just heard a self-serving, self-seeking, sanctimonious and tawdry little speech. Let us be clear about what is happening today: the Liberal Democrats have used their Supply day to debate the conduct of my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, knowing full well that he could not be here to defend his reputation.
"I certainly am focusing on the question of the older cow . . . that is jargon. . . for the beast above 30 months. That is the class of beef we should look at first".
That is all that he said about a cull in that interview. That is precisely what we did, and the 30-month scheme is now operating successfully. How did the press report my right hon. and learned Friend's remarks the following day?
"Ministers set to back killing of 4 million cattle",
and the headline in the Daily Express was
"Millions of cows facing slaughter".
Other newspapers carried similar headlines. The hon. Member for North Cornwall quoted Boris Johnson from today's edition of The Daily Telegraph and suggested that my right hon. and learned Friend had called for the culling of 4 million bovines. Any hon. Member who takes the time to read the interview will see that that is complete fiction: my right hon. and learned Friend said nothing of the sort. We must ask ourselves, who governs this country: the House or the misrepresenting media?
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