Mr President, like Mr Graefe zu Baringdorf, who spoke earlier, I was a member of the special Committee of Investigation into BSE. He would endorse my recollection that we added a whole series of special precautionary measures which would be needed before British beef could be deemed to be safe again. Those, along with the five Florence agreement provisions were all enacted. It was only then, after a three-year delay, that the beef ban was lifted in the strictly controlled terms that have been described by others in this debate. The logic of the case now being put to the Special Scientific Committee is that we should, in effect, overrule its previous hearings and reintroduce the beef ban across Europe. What else could the Scientific Committee say if it were to eat all its previous words? Surely what we should be doing is building on the kind of precautions which were introduced in the United Kingdom as a result of the BSE disaster. That means looking at the present position and not going backwards but asking how we can build in additional safeguards and precautions after they become available and bring a greater sense of urgency to the study of some of them, particularly live and post-mortem tests for cattle. Others have already said in this debate that we should have a European Food Agency looking at the kind of health precautions we need. That would include some things which are not yet present in other European countries. It would include the removal of MBM from the whole of the food, animal and poultry chain. That does not happen in some other countries. It means the rigid separation of risk materials, which again is not fully enforced. It means strict precautions against the kind of illegal practice which the Commission very promptly discovered in the matter of the adulteration of the bovine food chain by human and animal waste, which has happened recently in some other countries. The precautionary principle has to inform our policy but it must be on the basis of common principles, a hierarchy of standards which places health at the top. That is why the UK Government was the first to introduce the notion of a food standards agency, while Europe is still talking about it. That is why the DBES scheme specifically excluded anything about which there is still, or has been, a scintilla of doubt, including meat which is not deboned. Mrs Roure touched on the dangers of xenophobia in this debate. I want to salute the speech she made. It was very much in the spirit of the entente cordiale. It would be terrible for us, at this stage, to collapse into jingoism on either side of the Channel. I agree with the president of our own National Farmers’ Union who said this week that what made him most angry were people who were trying to make cheap political capital out of the tragedy that has engulfed his own members. The clash between two Member States over this unilateral ban could be disastrous. It will damage the single market. It will cost jobs if there are reciprocal sanctions and bans; and it will humiliate us if we turn up in Seattle bitterly divided and a quarrelsome rabble when we need to have a common front against the United States. We understand that Commissioner Byrne is to return from Dublin to Brussels today to chair a press conference with Mr Pascal when the Special Scientific Committee reports. He knows exactly what the problem is for the Commission and for European cooperation. I should like you, Commissioner Fischler, to convey to him, in the words of his own national poem that gloomy verse: “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity”. We want to see some passionate intensity from the best on this issue. We want to see people coming together and helping Europe to come together with the kind of undertakings which Parliament has called for, which the special Committee of Inquiry called for, and which alone will stop us degenerating into a Europe in which the European idea is the first casualty.

Political group: PSE