14 December, 2001

As usual, the French are playing a cunning game in the European Union. John Sheard wonders if Britain should learn from its Gallic neighbours.

THE LATEST French farce being played out in London and Paris, Brussels and Strasbourg, once more has British politicians, diplomats and farmers jumping up and down in rage.

Nothing new there. Frenchie has been infuriating us ever since we joined the then EEC almost 30 years ago - and for a couple of decades before that when General de Gaulle famously said "Non" to our belated attempts to join the Common Market.

But before you stifle a yawn, I should explain why these re-occurring rows have profound long-term consequences for the British countryside and all those who live and work in it.

We do not know yet if they will be fined billions of francs. We do not know if they will be forced to compensate British farmers for millions of pounds in lost sales. The NFU is still fighting a parallel case through the French courts which grind so slowly that they make the Mills of God look like a fairground carousel.

Few people doubt that the French decision was taken to protect the interests of their farmers, rather than the public health of their consumers. Naughty, naughty. But surely, two can play that game?

For years, the French treated the EEC as their own personal piggy bank, its main purpose being to extract cash from Germany. When, to their horror, they found themselves paying more out to the EEC than came in, they began to pick and choose which of the EU laws they would obey - and those they would ignore.

It is still possible to see in Paris today whole, unskinned carcasses of butchered animals hanging from hooks outside a butcher's shop, covered in flies in summer and basted in car exhaust fumes all year round.

An English butcher who did that would be hanged, drawn and quartered like the beast on display. For when it comes to the EU hygiene laws, the French - and the Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese - shrug their shoulders and say, "Poof."

In Britain, every such law is resolutely imposed by hordes of public health inspectors. In recent years, this has led to the closure of hundreds of small, local slaughterhouses which enabled our farmers to sell their meat to local people, saving transport costs and supporting local business.

There are many, many other similar instances - far too boring to go into here - but this disregard of red-tape has allowed the French to go on farming in an almost "peasant" style.

The result of this is that huge swathes of France still support a landscape unspoiled by prairie farming and other dubious practices of intensive production. Much of their food is sold locally and - you have to admit it - it tastes pretty good.

The long-distance transport of farm animals in Britain during the critical early days of the foot and mouth epidemic was a key cause of its wildfire spread across the country. Outbreaks in France and Holland were stamped out in days, rather than months.

So if the French can play fast and loose with the rules, why not us? A healthy agriculture based on small farms producing much of its food for local consumption is also a recipe for a healthy and beautiful countryside.

Back in the times of Agincourt, French soldiers were so afraid of English archers that, if they captured them, they would cut off their two bowstring fingers. When those same archers had slaughtered the knights of France on that battlefield, they held up their two very much intact fingers as an insult which is still in use today.

Is it time, perhaps, that we held up two fingers again to the red-tape peddlers in Brussels?

---

Comments

This has nothing to do with the French, foreign as they may be. It has wholly to do with the bloody-minded British Civil Service, (neither civil nor servile, unfortunately), who HATE any form of enterprise, as it makes them feel inferior, with their inflation-proof pensions, incompetence-based promotion schemes, etc.

---