BSE Crisis

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:31 pm on 13 November 1996.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Robin Cook Robin Cook , Livingston 3:31, 13 November 1996

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for putting that question again. We have repeatedly said that we regard British beef as safe and that we do not accept the ban, and we have repeatedly supported the Government in all the measures that they said would lead to a lifting of the ban.

After all that support, we are told that the ban cannot be lifted in the timetable that the Government promised, partly because they have done too little, too late, to combat BSE, starting at the very beginning, with their disastrous decision on taking office not to regulate the feedstuffs industry to a higher standard, on the grounds set out in their consultation paper: It is the wish of the Minister that in the present economic climate the industry itself should determine how to produce a high-quality product. The industry promptly responded by phasing out the chemical solvents that might have prevented BSE from getting into the food chain.

The Government long refused to accept the risk to public health from BSE, as exemplified by the famous observation of the present Secretary of State for the Environment that nobody need be worried about BSE, in this country or anywhere else. Fortunately, he was moved to another job just before we discovered how worried we ought to be.

Finally, even when Ministers introduced regulations to control BSE, they failed to enforce them, and as late as last year, 48 per cent. of slaughterhouses and 17 per cent. of rendering houses were in breach of BSE controls; and, in March this year, eight feed mills were still found to be breaching regulations to keep animal protein out of feedstuffs. The crisis in our beef industry was made in Britain. The genius of Her Majesty's Government is that, instead of solving the first crisis, they have paralleled it with a second crisis, in our relations with Europe.

I began by referring to the human hardship caused by the collapse of the beef market. Farmers, especially hill farmers, watched their way of life being put at risk, and workers in the processing industry watched their jobs disappearing. They are watching this debate and will note how we vote; we owe it to them to vote against a Government who have failed them, and we owe it to ourselves to vote against the Government, because we know that they deceived the House in June over the deal they brought back from Florence, and that they have broken the commitment they gave about when the ban would be lifted. All hon. Members with any self-respect must resent that deception, and I urge them to join us in the Lobby tonight.