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Mr. Nick Brown: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Gentleman is saying that I have misled the House, but of course I have done no such thing.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I hope that we can contain the debate within the normal rules. We do not want excess at this stage.
Mr. Yeo: Let me make it clear that what I said was that the Minister told the House:
- "As for a link between the ban on beef on the bone . . . and the date-based export scheme, no such link exists."---[Official Report, 28 October 1999; Vol.336, c. 1119.]
Mr. Brown: That cannot be so. For the avoidance of any doubt, the date-based export scheme is for deboned beef only. No beef on the bone can go through that scheme for exports to the European Union. That is a matter of fact, whatever the opinion of others.
Mr. Yeo: I am afraid that it is now all too clear why the French Minister runs rings round the British Minister, day in and day out.
Why will not the Minister ignore the Scottishand Welsh objections? Is not devolution supposed occasionally to involve some differences between what happens in England, in Scotland and in Wales?
Action on beef was not the only absentee from the Queen's Speech. Pig farmers, another casualty of the present Government's failures, were also totally ignored.
My hon. Friends, including my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire, mentioned their plight several times. A year ago, in an Opposition-inspired debate, I called for action on labelling to end the practice of describing food as British if it was grown abroad and merely processed here. I called for action to stop retailers selling pigmeat produced under conditions illegal in Britain without telling consumers about it. One year ago, I urged Ministers to make sure that the public sector purchased food that was produced to British standards. It took seven months for the Minister to follow that up.
On 1 July he told the House:
In this debate, the Minister was keen enough, in an intervention on the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), to take credit for having sent those letters. When the Minister allowed a misleading impression to be created by his answer on 1 July, it was the action of a weak man who is once again letting down British agriculture.
I turn to one more subject on which the Minister has recently again been vocal--the pesticides tax. On 20 October, the Minister told the House:
Mr. Letwin:
Has my hon. Friend noticed that another Minister may not support the Chancellor? That is the
Mr. Yeo:
My hon. Friend makes an important point. This seems to be one of those policies that just appear, without any provenance. One might call it a bastard policy--but perhaps that is an unparliamentary word.
Was the Minister simply too weak to win his argument with the Treasury, or did he lack the guts to stand up and defend Government policy? If he fails to defend Government policy in the House, when he is surrounded by numerous supporters, what chance can there be that he will defend British interests in Europe and elsewhere when he is surrounded by other Ministers, championing their national interests?
I am conscious that many other areas of agriculture are causing concern at the moment, but I have tried to focus primarily on the most topical issues. I recognise the urgency of addressing problems of over-regulation--which have been mentioned--including the burgeoning cost of the integrated pollution prevention and control proposals.
I recognise that dairy farmers, like pig farmers, are being forced out of business week by week and month by month. That process has been accelerated by the Government's unjustified refusal to allow Milk Marque to invest in higher value-added products in processing, without first being broken down into smaller and weaker units. The Minister keeps telling us that he wants farmers to co-operate more for the purposes of marketing, but it is the Government in whom he serves who have denied thousands of dairy farmers the chance to do so. Once again, he has placed British dairy farmers at a disadvantage to their continental counterparts, who are able to take part in such vertical integration.
At the common agricultural policy reform talks in March, the Prime Minister failed to stop Ireland--a country already four times self-sufficient in dairy products--from gaining an increase in its milk quota next year while British dairy farmers, who are denied by the quota system the chance to serve their own home market, will be further undercut by cheap imports from the Republic of Ireland.
Let me conclude with three suggestions. As I said at the beginning, I want to be as helpful as possible to the Minister. There are three things that he could announce before 7 o'clock tonight. First, instead of discussing with the French more concessions on the date-based export scheme, which will make it even harder for British beef exports to resume, he should launch a legal action to obtain compensation for British beef farmers for the loss of the exports that they should have been enjoying since 1 August this year.
Secondly, until France has published its answer tothe European Commission inspectors' report about contaminated meat and until that answer has been studied by British scientists to their complete satisfaction, the Minister should impose a precautionary ban to halt the sale of potentially contaminated French meat, which is coming into this country. Thirdly--perhaps the easiest and most overdue measure--the Minister should announce tonight that he is lifting the ban on beef on the bone in England.
The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. Nick Brown):
I am slightly disappointed, because the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) usually calls for me to resign, and he has not done so. I am not sure whether it is a softening of his attitude or a display of weakness on his part, but it is a disappointment to me, because it does my credibility with my colleagues and with the farming community no end of good when he makes such calls.
First, I refer to the two excellent maiden speeches that we have heard today. My hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) referred to his predecessor and wished him well, as I know that the whole House does, in his new and very important responsibilities. My hon. Friend's maiden speech was a well-judged balance between pride in the history and endeavours of his local community and a careful warning of the problems and challenges that face his constituency on child safety and drugs. He also referred to pensioner incomes and the need to reward people who work hard and want to earn a living and keep more of the income that they earn.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner) also made an impressive maiden speech. He, too, paid tribute to his predecessor, who was popular across the House. In particular, he paid tribute to Roger's important role in Anglo-Irish relations, for which I know he will be remembered here and in Ireland. My hon. Friend is clearly getting the hang of being a Labour Member of Parliament. He praised Mr. Blair, as Labour Members of Parliament are encouraged to do--[Hon. Members: "Oh!"] I used to be the Chief Whip. It is no use being surprised at that. My hon. Friend praised Mr. Eric Blair--George Orwell--the author perhaps best known for "The Road to Wigan Pier". He is right to remind us of the tremendous local efforts that have been made in Wigan to tackle structural unemployment and to remind us of the importance of access to the countryside, as it is understood by those who work in urban communities and look to the countryside for recreation.
We have had a good and wide-ranging debate. I was particularly struck by the opening speech for the Conservatives by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood). He put the ham into the Woking, having seemingly inherited all the jokes that the Leader of the Opposition discarded. He told us that he was brimming with ideas. We paused and a ripple went round the Government Front Bench as we waited to find out what was going to hit us. A quiet came over the whole House and then the right hon. Gentleman wished us a merry Christmas. I do not want to be left out, so I, too, wish everyone a merry Christmas. The right hon. Gentleman went on to describe his Front-Bench team as young and energetic--a controversial description, but the alternative would be to describe them as old and lazy, which is unfair--even I would not call them old.
The right hon. Gentleman lectured us about the downgrading of local democracy--this after a former Conservative Secretary of State for the Environment, the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), boasted of having abolished the GLC because he did not like the election result. It is not possible to downgrade democracy further than that. Two questions were asked, but the right hon. Member for Wokingham did not feel able to answer them, so, for the sake of accuracy, I shall do so. He was asked who introduced the fuel escalator. The answer is, the Conservatives. Then, he was asked who abolished it. The answer is, the Labour Government.
It came as a revelation to me, but perhaps I do not follow such matters as closely as I should, when the right hon. Gentleman told us of Lord Archer's exciting plan to sell London Underground. He did not say to whom Lord Archer would sell it, even though that is a fair question to ask of matters lying in Lord Archer's hands; nor did the right hon. Gentleman say how much Lord Archer would sell it for, which is an even fairer question. The right hon. Gentleman did not tell us about the impact of the policy on congestion, passenger fares or passenger safety, or what would happen to the pension fund arrangements, a relevant point which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody).
We heard the right hon. Member for Henley tell the House that the Labour Government had abolished the unelected Tory hereditary peers in an act of political spite. He failed to appreciate the irony of accusing us of acting out of political spite in that respect when he had boasted that the Thatcher Government had abolished the GLC because he did not like the election results. To hold that view is bad enough, to think it all right to state it in public is even worse, and to see nothing wrong with it even now is worse still.
The right hon. Gentleman became extremely upset about the Labour party internal arrangements for choosing candidates for public office--not determining the right to stand for public office, but choosing the Labour party candidate. He banged on for so long that he began to sound like a Labour party activist; for a moment, I thought that he was going to join the party, so great was his desire to participate in the process. Then, I looked across at the ranks of the Conservative parliamentary party and noticed that the more moderate and decent wing of the Conservative party was sitting at one end of the Chamber, on his own, and that the 17 other Conservative Members present were huddled behind the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo), no doubt in an attempt to bask in the hon. Gentleman's reflected glory and stay as far away from the right hon. Member for Henley as they could while still sitting on the Conservative Benches.
I have a great deal of sympathy with the remarks made by the right hon. Gentleman about local government structures and the way in which the current Government should approach such matters. The speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) was on similar lines. Those important matters are not as party political as some people try to make them: we all want structures that work for local government.
In winding up the debate, it is right that I concentrate on matters directly related to my portfolio. As I have done on many previous occasions, I shall respond specifically to the long list of charges and denunciations thrown at me
by the hon. Member for South Suffolk. He always says that he wants to help me, but it never sounds or feels like that. He complains about over-regulation. I am trying to bear down on the regulatory burden in the sector for which I am responsible. We set up working groups to consider priorities that were chosen not only by me, but in consultation with the National Farmers Union.
The hon. Gentleman complains that the Queen's Speech does not provide for more legislation on agriculture. I am trying to deal with the existing burden. A new approach to the industry, not a new Act of Parliament, is needed to tackle the problems in agriculture. Measures will be forthcoming from the Government this year--for example, announcements will be made about the rural development regulation. Although that does not require immediate primary legislation, it is an important mechanism for reshaping our support for agricultural communities and farm businesses.
The mechanism is important because it takes us from a system of price support through a system of compensation payments for price cuts to a system--I hope--that decouples support from production and strips into its component parts the theory of multifunctionality that underpins the common agricultural policy. That means that we will spend more public money on paying--defensibly, I believe--for the goods that we wish to purchase and that less money will underpin production, whether we want the product or not. That is an economically rational way forward that is right for our country, our taxpayers and our consumers, and it is right for our farmers as well. There will be fixed-rate payments, which will remain constant while public goods are purchased. They will not be subject to market fluctuations in the same way as the current CAP regime.
"I have on my desk draft letters waiting to go out to the major public authorities--the prisons, the health authorities and local authorities--not via other Departments but directly, urging them to source products of the highest welfare and animal welfare hygiene standards."--[Official Report, 1 July 1999; Vol.334, c. 422.]
No doubt, on 1 July, the Minister wanted farmers to believe that those letters would shortly be sent; but if they thought that, they would have been wrong. When I questioned the Minister four months later, on 26 October, he could not give a straight answer, and it transpired, incredibly, that those draft letters had remained unsent. They were sent to the authorities only after I had tabled a parliamentary question at the end of the summer recess, and I have little doubt that they would never have been sent if the Conservative Opposition had not actively pursued the matter on behalf of pig farmers.
"The whole world knows that I am an opponent of a pesticides tax."--[Official Report, 20 October 1999; Vol. 336, c. 457.]
Perhaps it was not quite the whole world who knew it, because last week, on 9 November, the Government published a document called the pre-Budget report, which, helpfully, has a section on pesticides. Paragraph 6.108 on page 112 says:
"The Government believes that a tax or charge could be a useful tool . . . in addressing the environmental impacts of pesticides."
As far as I know, the Minister is still a member of the Government, so perhaps this evening he will say whether he agrees with the pre-Budget report. It is, after all, an official document. It is not some crazed spin doctor employed by the Chancellor to rubbish his colleagues, although it may be having that effect. Or perhaps the Minister was hoping to be released from his present job and made one of Labour's numerous candidates for London mayor--a position for which he need not support Government policy anyway. If the Minister does support the Chancellor, will he explain what happened between 20 October and 9 November to produce such a dramatic change of view?
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