British Agriculture and Food Labelling

I read Farmers Weekly, and this morning when I was reading the editorial comment I saw that Jane King could not tell the difference between what the Conservative party believes in and what the Government believe in. I hope that she will read the speeches made in the debate and see that there is a massive void between a Government who are determined to protect the European Commission from making any decision whatever and my own party, which is determined to make a difference, to fight for our farmers and to allow our consumers to help our farming industry. The Minister was right to mention the egg sector, but her speech was definitely a rotten one. She did not even manage to answer my question in an intervention about what she was doing to ensure that the Ministry of Defence bought British bacon for our troops. They are fighting for us and dying for us, and they deserve to be fed by us. I hope that she will do what she can to put the situation right. As for the Liberal Democrats, they are absolutely right in their soundbites and I hope that they get their policies in order so that the dairy farmers, who know that they are being exploited, at least hear something that they can hope will be delivered. At the moment, the Liberal Democrats do not have a policy that has any credibility whatever, and I am sorry about that. In my constituency, farming really matters. The 2001 census showed that there were more than 3,600 people employed in it, which represents 9 per cent. of the local work force. My constituents need this Government or any Government to do three things, and the next Conservative Government will certainly do them. The first is to examine the red tape burden on our farmers. Compulsory electronic ID tags for sheep have been trialled in my constituency, and one of my constituents wrote to me saying that they had"““found the system was not practicable or reliable enough to work on a one man commercially run flock.””" I hope that the Government will listen to the people who have been trialling such things and do their best to ensure that such unnecessary burdens are not heaped upon our sheep farmers. The nitrate vulnerable zones that have been rolled out across large parts of our county are simply an extra burden, and I suspect that they will not deliver the benefits envisaged in the Government's well intentioned policy. They will cause more trouble, difficulty and cost, and they will not deliver the clean water that we want. The next problem is the Government's policy. I do not think that farmers feel that the Government are supporting them, and there is no finer example of that than the cider producers in my constituency. Bulmers has already closed its bottling plant with the loss of 54 jobs, and in the Budget in March 2008 the Government increased duties on bottled cider by 9 per cent. In last November's pre-Budget report, they increased them by a further 8 per cent. Nobody could argue that we want anything other than a level playing field on which to compete, but when such extra burdens are added to a fine British industry, one can only despair about what is going through the Government's mind. Time and again, I raise bovine TB. Hereford beef is the finest in the world—it is the most popular and the best. I am happy to declare an interest in that I have Hereford cattle—I am proud of that. How on earth can we continue to produce the finest beef in the world when only this week I got an e-mail from one of my farming constituents, who has the oldest herd of Hereford cattle in the world, saying that he had 150 cows taken away because of TB? We have the highest badger concentration—nearly four per square kilometre. Those badgers go away and die in agony in their setts. The disease starts with ulcers in their bladders and spreads to the other organs of their bodies. We can move on from the debate about the £100 million of taxpayers' money that is being spent on the TB strategy that is not working, but the animal welfare implications of the suffering of those badgers is unacceptable, and the Government's refusal to do anything about it is simply wrong. I call on the Under-Secretary to listen carefully to my hon. Friends' comments. We must stop importing cruel practices and stop badgers' unnecessary suffering. We must stop misinforming the public about what they buy and start helping consumers to help our farmers. Most important, we must use the Government's purchasing power to ensure that our troops, our schools and our hospitals get the finest food in the world—that means that it has got to be British and say so on the label.