QUICK END TO BEEF BAN RULED OUT BY BONINO

By Toby Helm and Joy Copley

EMMA Bonino, the European Commission's new head of food safety, caused another row between Brussels and Britain yesterday bydeclaring that a rapid lifting of the beef ban was "out of the question".

The Brussels Commission she said, would not consider recommending an end to the worldwide ban on British beef for "a long time".

Last night a spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture expressed "great surprise" at the comments and said that the ban on British beef was unjustified. "British beef is the safest in Europe if not the world," he said.

Ministers will be dismayed by Mrs Bonino's remarks as they were hoping that new British proposals sent to Brussels this week would pave the way for progress within a few weeks.

Last night Euro-sceptic Tory MPs reacted angrily to the interview and Teresa Gorman the MP for Billericay, said: "What is destroying our industry is the British Government's own supine attitude towards the Commission. We are like primitive savages trying to appease the gods with sacrifices of our cattle. It is humiliating for a member of the Government to go through this ritual to appease the unappeasable."

In particular, the response from Mrs Bonino, better known in Britain for her attempts to reduce the size of the UK fishing fleet, will dismay Douglas Hogg who sent his plans to Franz Fischler the agriculture commissioner, on Wednesday.

Speaking to the French newspaper, Le Monde, almost exactly a year after Brussels embargoed all exports of beef and beef products from the UK. Mrs Bonino said: "It is out of the question to relax the embargo... We are not even thinking of lifting the embargo. And we will not think of it for a long time."

Under the British plan, Mr Hogg said beef would only be exported from animals killed under the age of 30 months in herds that had either never had cases of BSE or had not had any for at least six years.

In a letter to Mr Fischler, Mr Hogg claimed that Britain had fulfilled all the conditions of an agreement for the phased lifting of the beef ban agreed between John Major and fellow by EU leaders in Florence last June.

Mrs Bonino's comments took some officials in the European Commission by surprise. A spokesman for Mrs Bonino said she was probably referring to the time it would take to organise inspections of so-called "certified" herds in the United Kingdom.

"If that is what she said to Le Monde then I do not want to deny that. Certainly it' would take a long time before all the inspections could take place."