Soliciting some serious money The legal firm of Chadbourne and Park has done the case for a
Soliciting some serious money
The legal firm of Chadbourne and Park has done the case for a graduate tax, which we support, or repayable loans, as Labour proposed yesterday, no end of good, unwittingly of course.
According to their recruitment advertisements, solicitors can earn pounds 700,000 a year, on a par with the top City traders. It is a pity the Government prefers to try to bully and bluster its way out of the corner (it will fail) rather than adopt it.. The second is that other countries have national anxieties and national interests which they cannot easily be bullied into abandoning. The third is that confronted with such a crisis the industry and the country desperately needs leadership to implement a strategy to put the industry back on a firm footing Such a strategy is clearly available. Dairy herds could be exempt, so long as their calves are kept out of the food chain. The European Union should be prepared to put in hundreds of millions of pounds to help to compensate farmers for these extra losses.There are three lessons from this affair None of them should be new to the Government.
The first is that consumer markets are sometimes irrational but that doesn’t mean they can be bucked. British farms should be restocked from BSE-free herds abroad. The Government must revert to its original plan to cull all beef herds where BSE outbreaks have occurred. Meanwhile the calves from BSE-infected herds, which could be incubating the disease, are left in the food chain. A supplementary slaughter programme of first 40,000, and then 80,000, of the cattle most “at-risk” has been offered by the Government to win support in Brussels.This is not enough.
When the issue comes to a special meeting of farm ministers next month, Mr Major’s threats are more likely to damage our cause than win the day.The way forward is not to bully and threaten. It is to mount a gigantic marketing and public relations exercise for British beef But first we need a credible message to market. When Perrier water was found to have been contaminated 10 years ago, the French company took the drastic step of recalling and destroying every bottle in circulation, whether affected or not. Within two years, Perrier had returned to pre-scare levels of sales and respect.We are not advocating the destruction of all British bovines. But a much bigger effort is needed to convince the world that BSE is being rooted out of British herds.
At the same time, an independent international scientific investigation should be sought by Britain – presided over by the World Health Organisation – to re-state the safety of our meat.So far the Government has announced a cull of all beef cattle aged over 30 months: the oldest animals in the business, those which have shown no signs of developing BSE, are to be incinerated. Even if their countries can be forced to import British beef, they cannot be forced to eat it. They remain deeply suspicious of our meat, however irrationally (but who, after all the confusions of recent months, can say that it is irrational?). This is not one of those arcane EU arguments over levels of barley set- asides. In the eyes of European consumers, it could be a matter of life and death.Given the British government’s mad cow record of muddle, half-truth, bluster and incompetence, (matched at times only by the press, it has to be admitted) it is remarkable that as many as seven EU countries supported Britain in the chief vets’ meeting in Brussels on Monday. This country will only win back the confidence of European governments if we win the confidence of European consumers.Consumers cannot be ordered to be confident. But he also warned that this was no longer a scientific matter but a question of consumer confidence.