Making friends and influencing people

Date: 20/03/1997

AS BRITISH Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg formally began his campaign this week to get the ban on beef exports from UK herds certified as being free of BSE lifted, minds were inevitably cast back to the dark months which followed British Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell's admission - a year ago today (20 March) - of a possible link between the illness in cattle and the fatal human condition Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

Dorrell's statement sparked the biggest-ever crisis in Europe's beef industry and plunged the EU's relations with the UK into their deepest trough yet.

After tortuous negotiations at the EU summit in Florence in June, British Prime Minister John Major claimed victory for his policy of non-cooperation and told the nation that the UK would be in a position to get the beef export ban lifted by November.

Four months on, it is hard to find a British official who is prepared to make a firm prediction about the timetable for even a partial lifting of the ban.

The UK's case has not been helped by its decision last autumn to suspend the promised selective cattle slaughter programme. Although that decision was reversed in December, the cull did not actually begin until the end of last month.

Nor have its chances of getting the ban lifted been aided by the findings of the European Parliament's temporary committee of inquiry into the handling of the BSE crisis and recent allegations that a report on conditions in British abattoirs may have been suppressed.

But, above all, its position has been undermined by the very policy of non-cooperation which Major hailed as such a success.

If there is one thing EU veterans have learnt about playing the Brussels game, it is that allies are vital if you want to get your way in difficult circumstances - and allies are precisely what the UK has lacked over the past 12 months.

The stark truth is that the British government has few friends in Europe these days.

Its constant sniping attacks on the Union, its refusal to countenance changes to the Maastricht Treaty which others regard as so important and its attempts to undermine the single currency project by repeatedly insisting that the 1 January 1999 deadline is very unlikely to be met have merely reinforced the impression created by the long days of non-cooperation that the current administration simply cannot be won over to the cause and should therefore be sidelined wherever possible.

With sales of beef hit harder in other EU countries than in the UK as consumer confidence plummeted, other member states know that there is little domestic political mileage to be gained from extending a helping hand to the British.

What the UK has singularly failed to do is give them any other incentive to hurry moves towards a phased lifting of the ban along. It is a lesson which the members of this government - and those who hope to replace it in the forthcoming British general election on 1 May - would do well to learn from.