What early lessons in political handling can we take from ‘Horsegate’? First, Mary Creagh’s energy and focus have been a lesson in effective opposition. She and her team deserve great credit for asking the right questions, being highly visible and using intelligence and research with forensic effectiveness while avoiding the risk of appearing to scaremonger. Well done!
Second, if you’re a minister, you need to get a grip and get the message clear. Last Friday evening, I tweeted ‘What a relief. Owen Paterson has appeared. At one point today I feared he’d been chopped up and put in a lasagne’. Nobody expected the environment secretary to have all the answers, but they did expect him to be visibly willing to explain what action was being taken and what questions were being asked. When he did finally appear, he didn’t seem to have thought through the answer to the most obvious question – whether he would eat the lasagne and other dodgy products himself. He said he would, while food minister David Heath gave people the official advice to return any of these products to the shop they’d been bought from. Sort out your messages, guys.
Third, in the absence so far of a clear explanation of how this situation has arisen, people are choosing their targets for blame according to their prejudices. For some the villains are supermarkets. But this fails to recognise that the problem seems is not just the end of the food supply chain, but also the complex and convoluted chain from abbatoir to supermarket shelf. There are other businesses which seem to be at least as guilty as the retailers. It also fails to recognise that it is not just through supermarkets that the adulterated food is being distributed to the final consumer. School dinners and prison food have also been affected – no supermarket involved there.
Eurosceptics and xenophobes have jumped at the opportunity to blame other European partners or the EU itself. If anything proved the importance of European regulation, it’s the international nature of food processing. Without the leadership and cooperation of the Irish FSA, we would never have tested our meat products in the first place. The Romanian prime minister was robust in defending meat production in his country. He may or may not be justified in doing that, but he had every right to feel angry at the uninformed assumption that the problem must have come from his country.
There also seems to have been some briefing against the Food Standards Agency presumably from Tories wanting to shuffle off responsibility. It was Tory antipathy to ‘quangos’ which led them to split up responsibilities for labelling between two government departments in 2010. They weakened the organisation and then blamed them when they couldn’t carry out the responsibilities that they’d been stripped of in the first place.
Finally, there has been a degree of sanctimonious comment about the cheapness of the adulterated products. Not everyone is willing or able to trawl the independent butcher or farmers’ market for their meat products. Being poor and buying cheap food doesn’t mean you deserve to be ripped off.
It isn’t yet clear what the cause of these problems is. It’s important that we get to the bottom of the problem as quickly as possible and start rectifying it. Until then, I hope Mary Creagh continues her excellent work, ministers get their acts together and the rest of us stop jumping to pre-programmed conclusions.
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Jacqui Smith is former home secretary, writes the Monday Politics column for Progress, and tweets @smithjj62
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