Why hasn't this been on the TV and Radio news?

Why haven't the Tories been shouting about this story?


A grim legal first killed this firm
By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/10/nbook10.xml

Members of the House of Lords were shocked last Wednesday to hear, from Lord 
Willoughby de Broke, the extraordinary story behind the closure in October 
of a Lancashire cheese firm, employing 26 people.

John Wright had built up Bowland Dairies in Nelson into an £8-million-a-year 
business making curd cheese, mostly exported to five EU countries, including 
France and Germany, for use in quiches and flans. On June 12, inspectors of 
the European Commission's Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) visited the plant 
for 90 minutes, looked through the paperwork and, after misinterpreting one 
document, issued a "rapid alert notice" that its products were unsafe. The 
milk in the cheese, they claimed, broke EU rules on antibiotic residues.

On June 20, after thoroughly inspecting the plant, Britain's Food Standards 
Agency (FSA) strongly disagreed. It recommended one or two minor changes in 
procedure, and allowed production to resume.

advertisementOn July 4 the commission repeated its claim that the milk did 
not comply with EU rules. The FSA responded that the FVO inspectors seemed 
to be confused over the type of milk the firm used. Telling the European 
Standing Committee on the Food Chain that "no evidence was found that 
contaminated milk was used", the FSA issued a notice to all EU member states 
that Bowland's cheese was entirely safe and fit for market. The commission 
appended its own negative comments to this notice, effectively maintaining 
the ban.

Black propaganda began to appear, claiming that the firm had been selling 
cheese contaminated with cleaning fluid and sweepings from the floor. 
Bowland took the commission before the ECJ and, on September 8, Judge Bo 
Vesterdorf, president of the Court of First Instance, having reviewed the 
case legally and scientifically, found unreservedly in the company's favour.

The commission was ordered to withdraw its notice and its comments about the 
firm. Twice it refused. On September 12 Vesterdorf ordered it to "stand 
aside". The commission tried to add a statement to the court order, claiming 
that it had lost on a mere technicality. The judge ordered this to be 
removed, observing: "It is sad that a company is dying while giants fight it 
out".

On September 27 the FVO returned to Bowland, this time for an exhaustive 
two-day inspection, but could find little wrong. (Any findings, the 
commission's chief inspector told Mr Wright, would be "non-emergency".)

However, on October 4, the commission asked its standing committee to 
approve a commission decision banning Bowland from further trading. The 25 
members present were not shown the court's judgment or any technical 
evidence, other than a defence of the new procedure for testing antibiotic 
residues - from the firm which had devised it. Twenty two countries voted 
for a total ban, with Britain abstaining.

The commission announced that it would seek to have the UK food safety 
authorities fined for failing to protect consumers against contaminated milk 
(despite the court ruling and the lack of any evidence of contamination). 
Furthermore Britain was warned that the FVO was about to carry out a full 
audit of Britain's £5-billion-a-year cheese industry.

Despite the FSA's solid support of Bowland and its insistence that no rules 
had been broken, the Department of Health bowed to the commission's diktat. 
On October 16 it rushed through a statutory instrument, the Curd Cheese 
(Restriction on Placing on the Market) Regulations 2006, to take immediate 
effect. Section 3 read "No person shall place on the market any curd cheese 
manufactured by Bowland Dairy Products Limited".

Never before, it is believed, has a statutory instrument been issued in 
Britain directed at closing down a single named company (breaching the 
ancient principle of British law that "the law must be blind", i.e. it must 
be general in application, not directed at any specific individual or body).

When Lord Willoughby de Broke recounted this chilling story last week, 
eloquently supported by others, including Lord Greaves, a Lib Dem who lives 
near Mr Wright's plant, peers were visibly horrified. The only defence that 
Lord Warner, as junior health minister, could muster (apart from seriously 
misrepresenting the terms of Vesterdorf's judgment) was to plead that 
failure to implement the commission's decision "would constitute a serious 
breach of the UK's obligations under the EC Treaty". For truth, justice, the 
rule of law and Britain it was a black day.