Recently, Brown announced that he was personally boycotting food produced in France, shortly after the French government's decision to maintain its ban on British beef despite a European Union ruling to lift such bans. The EU originally imposed a ban on the export of British beef in 1996, asserting it was not safe due to "mad cow disease."

Brown claims that the labeling rules and boycott are in response to new allegations that some livestock in France is fed pellets that include treated human waste. British prime minister Anthony Blair weighed into the reactionary campaign, claiming that the "discovery" that animals in France were fed like this was "awful."

These chauvinist campaigns on both sides of the channel pit workers and farmers in the UK against their counterparts in France, as the rival national ruling classes try to protect their own share of the market.  
 

Chauvinist campaigns in Britain

The Labour Party government's moves are part of a widening campaign by big-business food retailers, leaders of farmers organizations, and bourgeois politicians against goods produced in France. Supermarket chains have announced they are taking various French-made products off the shelves. Budgen will stop selling French apples and pears, Asda is banning all French meat and replacing French-made dough for baguettes and croissants with dough made in Britain, and Somerfield will take French apples from the shelves. French apple producers claimed there was a 20 percent fall in orders from Britain following these supermarket bans.

French meat has been banned from all school canteens in the county of Kent by the Conservative Party–controlled county council. Farmers' leaders demanded that other education authorities take similar actions.

On October 20 French police stopped a demonstration of Conservative Members of the European Parliament in Paris. The British MEPs carried banners that read "Let them eat British beef," a parody of the infamous declaration "Let them eat cake" by Marie Antoinette, wife of French king Louis XVI.

In the British Parliament, Conservative MPs called for the government to impose an immediate ban on all French-produced meat. Opposition agriculture spokesperson Timothy Yeo argued that Brown "has proved that he is too weak to stand up for the British farmer and the British consumer." Yeo said that Brown was "putty in the hands of the prime minister's European agenda."

Blair recently launched the nationalistic "Britain in Europe" campaign, backed by former Conservative government ministers Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke. The campaign, designed to win support for Britain joining the recently launched single European currency, is opposed by the current Conservative Party leadership, who differ over how to defend the interests of the British bosses against their rivals in Europe.

The right-wing tabloid Daily Mail is beating the nationalistic drums with a campaign, "Just Say Non," listing French-produced items it urges readers not to buy and promoting British-produced "replacements." This effort is backed by the National Farmers Union, which is dominated by large capitalist farmers.  
 

Farmers are pitted against each other

Farmers from the Mole Valley in Devon protested the ban on British beef outside the French embassy in London October 22, roasting beef and offering it to people passing by. One of the farmers, Geoffrey Cox, commented, "We need the friendship of the French farmers. They are the most politically powerful agricultural force in Europe. Some of our best friends are French farmers. It is the politicians who are getting it all wrong."

Other actions have directly targeted farm products from France, however. Two days before, hundreds of farmers in Poole, England, confronted and turned back two trucks filled with beef when they arrived on a ferry from France. The farmers waved British flags and chanted "No frog food," according to the Washington Post.

In response, farmers in France have begun to search trucks arriving from Britain. The Daily Mail front page October 27 claimed that "French farmers halt our lorries with blazing barricades."

According to a less exaggerated report in the Daily Telegraph, 20 trucks were stopped and the drivers in each cooperated with the farmers who searched them. No British beef was discovered.

As this trade conflict was escalating, a European "scientific committee" concluded October 29 that regulations for the export of British beef didn't need to be tightened as the French government had been demanding. Following this the German government indicated that it would lift its ban on British beef exports.

There are still estimated to be more than 2,000 cases of mad cow disease, or BSE, among cattle in the UK. Neither the British government nor any other European country has ever proposed immediately destroying all the infected cattle with adequate compensation to farmers.

The "findings" of various scientific bodies largely reflect the balance of forces among the competing European capitalist rulers, and have little to do with protecting the health of working people or the interests of working farmers in France, the UK, or anywhere else.  
 
 
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