If he had been Prime Minister in 1940, the whole of the British Expeditionary Force would have been lost, as he hesitated between choosing to save our Army and responding to our Continental allies’ demands that it should stay and suffer the catastrophe awaiting their armies.
Today, by feebleness and vacillation a grave problem has been turned into a catastrophe, as Mr Blair and his agricultural minister vacillate between their orders from Brussels and their duty to Britain.
I don’t suppose that the EU positively wants Britain’s herds to be slain, but the simultaneous reduction in future EU payments to Britain’s farms which would be the result of the slaughter policy (which payments are unrelated to our payments to the EU) coupled with a huge additional market for continental food, would help the EU enormously in dealing with the queue of EU applicant countries headed by Poland – a country with a huge farming industry.
The burning of infected sheep and cattle on huge pyres, the draught from which spreads the virus hither and thither is insane, but by contrast with 1967, the farming industry is pinned down by a mass of EU environmental regulations, however inappropriate, which control what we, in our own country, can put in our own soil.
The mass slaughter of uninfected animals, their corpses left rotting in stinking piles for days, is likewise insane when perfectly good vaccines are available to protect herds at risk from infection. Some farmers who have already had their herds slaughtered are evidently opposed to this as is the NFU – ever sensitive to the EU’s wishes.
It is said that our export trade of some hundreds of millions may be at risk if we cannot show absence of the virus in our herds. But even if true, what is a few hundred millions worth besides the thousands of millions this catastrophe is set to cost with the present policy.
Slaughter is in Brussels’ interest, not ours. In the 1980’s the Conservatives surrendered control of our external trade relations to the EU. The EU is afraid the USA and Japan will embargo the exports of any EU country if any EU country is known to have traces of foot and mouth, but there is no proof that the USA and Japan would do this.
This is near the nub of the foot and mouth crisis. Irrespective of anything else, we need the farming industry to produce food for our people. Some Smart-Alec financial journalists have said it doesn’t matter much because like coal mining, ship building, etc we can always find other things to do like – tourism, sandwich making (believe it or not) – and farming is only 2% of GDP.
Unlike these activities – and financial journalism – we do have to eat. If we do not produce £16bn of foodstuffs, we shall have to import them. What exports could possibly pay for these? Sixteen billion pounds is more than the total output of cars and aerospace combined and more than twice their current exports. Despite all the hype about a strong economy, we are currently running a trading deficit of £30bn (over £1,000 per employed person) and that can as well be corrected by reduced imports as by increased exports. We have as a country to produce more of what our consumers – and other nations’ consumers – actually want and not live everlastingly on tick or on the interest on past investments. This is what retired people do and I am not here tonight because I believe in a retired Britain.
Leadership in line with Britain’s interests would combine:
· slaughter and burial of infected animals
· vaccination of uninfected animals at risk of infection
· a rigidly enforced ban on any plant or animal imports not coming from certified disease-free countries
· a guarantee to farmers to pay for restocking our farms
· a requirement that all imported or home produced meat on sale to the consumer be traceable, through the slaughterhouses back to the farm and the animal
· repeal of the regulations making small slaughterhouses unviable so that animals do not have to make 300 mile journeys
· certification by British vets that foreign farms and slaughterhouses quoted in the trace are complying with our standards – if not no import licence.
Of course neither the Labour nor Conservative parties will have the stomach for this for fear of giving offence or breaking an EU regulation, or both. But if we can trace the factory of origin of the components in our own TV sets and identify the individual testers – which we can – then we can do it, must do it – for our own food. This seven point plan would deal with the problem now and give our farmers the expectation of a level playing field to compete with imports and expand their own production.