AS EVER I am indebted to good friends for keeping me up to speed. I understand that a television programme had set out to expose the "black economy" in selling meat to butchers and restaurants that had been illegally slaughtered. Unfortunately it did not explain the reason behind this trade. So what's new?

If you bring in a daft policy then sooner or later there will be some who will find a way round it. I think perhaps John Gummer was the first but others followed suit saying they had to implement European Commission hygiene rules and so, since 1999, firstly the Ministry for Agriculture Farming and Food and then the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs were instrumental in closing more than 70 per cent of Britain's slaughterhouses. Now our tradition was to rely on meat inspectors to oversee the slaughter process and to assess the meat for human consumption. This all seemed to work well, but as well as this, good old Brussels said you must have a vet to first inspect all slaughter animals on the hoof - thus adding to the expense. Remember we did it our way for years; it wasn't broke so why did we fix it? Answer because Brussels ordered us to.

The EC was obsessed with having all abattoirs fit into the same sort of pigeonhole; some call it a regulatory straightjacket. Using the heading of "EC export rules" it forced hundreds of smaller slaughterhouses to adopt the same standards of structure that were really intended to apply to huge factory abattoirs geared up for supplying supermarkets and burger bars.

We all know of perfectly good smaller slaughterhouses which were forced to close because people could not afford to pay for the changes Brussels insisted upon and which were over the top and not at all suited to their businesses, nor did they have much to do with catering for safer meat. You have heard me talk about bureaucrats, even worse we now have Eurocrats! Because slaughterhouses are usually now so many miles apart, problems are created both for farmers and butchers as well as welfare problems for the animals. Slaughter should take place as near as reasonably possible to where the animals have been produced or finished. It would appear that everyone knows this except politicians.

Because none of this explanation was put forward on the television programme it left the butchers and the farmers to take the blame. I understand that there was a slight exemption from EC rules which allowed very small, low throughput abattoirs to cater for local farmers and butchers (who of course produce much of the country's top quality meat, according to some of the best known chefs). In 1999 Lord Witty said that 190 low throughput red meat slaughterhouses had managed to survive in England but, by 2003, there were only 141. Guess what? Now the EC had decreed that the exemption has to be abolished. So, unless these fine but small businesses can come up with hundreds of thousands of pounds to get into the same bracket as the big industrial abattoirs, then there is nothing for them but to close down. Incidentally, the large concerns or at least many of them received large sums of public money in the 1980s to bring them up to EC export standard.

It rather looks as though, in the next two years, the small abattoirs will disappear because they cannot afford the huge sums involved.

Yet again Brussels and DEFRA will look to have achieved their ambition. Some of the best quality meat will no longer be available, so I leave you to guess who will be cheering then. Oh yes and I have not even mentioned road miles and the environment.

Dialect word: Scaler meaning a machine used to spread hay for drying before baling that also encourages rain!

Thought for the day: A suggested prayer for Eurocrats "Oh God give the world a lot more common sense, beginning with me."