POLITICS
We can't defeat the French by thinking with our stomachs
BRUCE ANDERSON
There are moments when most of us feel like that, and it would be so easy to give way to our emotions. Easy, and useless. There are only two worthwhile conclusions to be drawn from this affair, and both are unpalat- able (though nothing to do with French animal-feeding practices). The first is that Britain is principally to blame for the whole mess; the second, that the only hope of re- introducing our beef to the Continent lies in the mechanisms of the European Union.
Let us remember how the whole fiasco began: with one of the most shameful instances of misgovernment in modern polit- ical history. No one comes well out of the BSE/CJD saga. The government, the oppo- sition, the scientists, the press — and the public: all deserve castigation. At the outset, there was a crucial failure of grip. The first meeting to tackle the crisis was attended by more than 30 ministers and officials, which is no way to tackle a crisis. That said, it would not have been easy for any government to deal with public hysteria, let alone one whose political authority had been so severe- ly undermined. Equally, the ministers' embarrassMents were promptly exploited by an unscrupulous opposition, which did everything possible to convince the voters that they were menaced by an epidemic. This was compounded by an unscrupulous press which knows that panic sells papers. Panics can also destroy an industry and the livelihoods of thousands of decent families; no one seemed to care.
The scientists, meanwhile, were little better than the Daily Mirror's leader-writers. Any- one who believes that science is a disinter- ested activity, immune from rabble-reflexes, should consider BSE. When research grants, reputations and rivalries are in play, pure science often becomes a secondary consider- ation. Not that it would have been easy to reassure a public which seemed set on pan- icking, any more than it is easy to assure a four-year-old that there is not a horrid ghost hidden under his bed waiting to gobble him up. The public reaction to BSE helps one to understand how men were able to burn witches. Better, perhaps, that four million cattle should burn than one witch — but what a'grotesque waste of £3.5 billion, not to mention over a million tons of good meat.
All that money later, there is still no rea- son to believe that BSE causes old-variant CJD. There could be a connection with new- variant CJD, but that is far from proven. Old-variant CJD has always been an extremely rare disease, and so it remains; the risks of dying from it are only slightly greater than the risk of being struck by light- ning. There are no grounds for believing that new-variant CID will be significantly more dangerous.
The Europeans also made their contribu- tion to our beef farmers' tragedy. They shamelessly exploited the problems — but who can blame them? It would go against commercial human nature to fail to take advantage of a business rival's weakness; it was inevitable that foreign producers would seize the opportunity to exclude our beef from their markets. If we were prepared to spend millions of pounds on destroying British beef carcasses, we can hardly expect the foreigners to be keen to eat the stuff. Yes, of course, there is a technical distinc- tion between the beef that was condemned and the beef that would have been offered for sale, but it is unfair to expect foreign cus- tomers to grasp such technical distinctions. If the government, the opposition, the media and the public all join forces to set up the beef anti-marketing board, they can hardly blame anyone else when their efforts are successful.
Nor can we blame the Europeans for British beefs continuing problems. As we discovered some years ago during lengthy and frustrating trade negotiations with the Japanese, it is one thing to ensure open mar- kets, quite another to persuade the customer to buy in those markets. The best tariff bar- rier the Japanese ever devised was the reluc- tance of most Japanese to purchase non-lux- ury foreign goods. Even if all bans on British beef were lifted tomorrow., does anyone believe that Europeans will be rushing to buy it, especially when our government refuses to remove the ban on beef on the bone, which is beef at its best. Yes, there is another technical distinction here: equally irrelevant to the actual business of selling beef. Until our government expresses full confidence in our beef, why should any for- eigner do so?
So it is no use blaming the foreigners for our failures, just as there is no point in Nick Brown undertaking his futile boycott of French food. His future in the Cabinet is looking distinctly uncertain, for his behaviour has — rightly — infuriated his colleagues, who are already on edge over the supposed photographs of a minister in a homosexual liaison. I am reliably informed, by the way, that they have nothing to do with Peter Mandelson and that any rumours to the contrary are the vilest calumny. The pho- tographs are said to be of a senior minister who once had to be carried out of a homo- sexual night-club in Havana; inter alia, he had over-indulged in alcohol.
The French are equally guilty of over- indulgence; they can never resist an opportu- nity to do down the Anglo-Saxons. But the only way to do them down in turn is to use Europe's legal mechanisms. It is maddening that this should be so; it seems a gross viola- tion of the spirit of St Crispin's day: 'He which hath no stomach to this fight.... ' But we cannot win this particular fight by thinking with our stomachs.
Apropos of stomachs, the French have been guilty of one gross betrayal: their fail- ure to distinguish between a farm and a sewage farm. To believe that French agricul- ture can only be competitive if its animals are fed on human excrement is to allow French cuisine to be polluted by Vichyite defeatism.
A generation ago, in debate with a French gourmet, an Englishman was temerarious enough to claim that English cookery was superior to the French ver- sion. Not surprisingly, he was losing the argument, so he tried to score a debating point about the state of French plumbing. This only provided his opponent with the coup de grace: 'Alors, Monsieur, en France, on mange bien; en Angleterre, on chic hien.' Since those days, French lavatories have improved considerably. This still does not mean that their products should be fed to farm animals.
Previous page
