I AM indebted to good friends for bringing me up to date on the wider scene.

Not being a particular fan of supermarkets, I often take them to task for squeezing the life out of producers. However, I hope I am always fair enough to say so when I think they do something right - so here goes.

Well done to the supermarket that is spending more than £1million on its campaign to stick a Union Jack on all home-grown products in its stores along with a label to certify they are British. I'm all for that and I hope you will be too.

I should really say doubly well done when you realise that labelling British food as being British is, I understand, a breach of the law. I kid you not, for this is according to EU law (I think perhaps we're supposed to bow at that mention). This is yet another daft law which makes it illegal to label food with its country of origin: well, I understand dear old Brussels claims this is discrimination. So that's' all right then. How silly can they get? Perhaps we ain't seen nothing yet.

It could only be EU law that makes it legal to attach a Union Jack to a frozen chicken describing it as having been produced in good old Britain, but only so long as it is not taken to mean that the bird itself was grown in the UK. If the frozen chicken is imported, from say Thailand, as long as it is processed and packed in Britain you can legally call it British. I further understand the same goes for Dutch or Danish bacon and other produce too. You may recall I claimed that the greatest scarcity we faced in these times was that of common sense. I wasn't wrong was I?

There's more. Guess what was one of the ways used by France to get over this daft regulation. They stuck a label on that said "Not made in France".

I read what I thought was an eminently sensible thing to do and, which I confess, I hadn't heard about. It seems Tory MP Stephen O'Brien attempted to introduce a bill in Parliament to make it legal to put a

"British" label on British food and illegal to put these labels on food from elsewhere. This was supported by MPs from all parties but minister Joyce Quinn went to town on him, pointing out that his bill was an offence against EU law and that it would be "an abuse of parliamentary procedure" to allow it to continue. You know me, I'm saying nowt, but I know whose side I would be on.

I live in hopes that someone will invent a regulation-proof fence that could be constructed around Brussels. I was rather thinking about a permanent one.

Dialect word: Snigs, meaning eels.

May 15, 2003 12:30