Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, may I remind you that we have been talking about beef labelling since 1997. At that time, we fought manfully – and womanfully! – against the Council, shoulder to shoulder with the Commission. It could be exactly the same again today. I remember it well – things were just as heated as in the BSE days. But we tried this here in Parliament ten years ago, and that is why I want to clearly remind some of you again that labelling has nothing to do with the safety of a product. There are two very different issues here. One is the safety of a product, and the only products we should allow on the European market are safe products and those that involve no risk for consumers. The other issue is consumer information and the consumer’s right to choose. You can only exercise your freedom of choice if you are well informed. This applies to the origin of tomatoes just as much as it does to preservatives or colouring agents in food, and it also applies to which beef or meat products in general I would like to buy, because I am sure you will not be surprised to hear that I would of course like to go further. I would like to see labelling of all meat products and not just beef products. I am sure that Mr Fischler will agree with me on this. I can understand Mr Papayannakis, our rapporteur, when he says that this House has pressed for this legislation to come into force. And when he says that we in this House have brought forward the date it is to come into force. And that now, if we are to maintain our credibility, we must strive to enforce this legislation as quickly as possible. He is quite right! I understand that, but I nevertheless voted for the amendments in committee and will do the same again in this Chamber tomorrow. One thing is certain: I do not intend to be held hostage by the Council. If the Council, in its infinite wisdom, which is often a mystery to me, believes that it has to amend the common position so that it is not the same as the text debated at first reading and the text Parliament approved with the Commission’s agreement, and if the Council therefore makes a decision at the initiative of one Member State and with the somewhat reluctant agreement of other Member States, than that really is something new for us! The categories of animal added are also something new for us. I might even have been prepared to say, fine, so be it. But I would like to know just what these categories are. So my attitude towards the Commission, which has otherwise become positively affectionate in recent years, is rather more critical in this respect. I would have liked to know what categories you have in mind, and I might then still have been willing to say ‘OK’. But I am not going to play the dangerous game of saying that I agree to the categories and then find out in about six months’ time that categories have been adopted under the committee procedure that make me shake my head in disbelief. That is why tomorrow, in common I hope with the majority of this House, I will be voting – as I did in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection – to delete these categories. As Mr Whitehead said, it need not take long. We do not need a Conciliation Committee – the Council and the Commission can simply accept Parliament’s amendments, and then the job is done.

Political group: PSE