IF EVER there was a hollow "victory" it has to be Prime Minister John Major's hasty retreat over the beef crisis.

After a month of bluffing and bravado he has finally climbed down and accepted a Brussels package which meets none of our original demands.

Yet, at the same time, it's claimed to be a victory because it clears the way for today's Florence summit.

What it fails to clear up is the big question mark over when the rest of the world will be allowed to buy our beef.

There is no instant solution to this immense problem of the Government's own making.

For let us not lose sight of the fact that the Government's failure to take a firm hand in the first place allowed the crisis to escalate to worldwide proportions.

Months of wrangling over culls have clouded the original issue - the fact that we are in this embarrassing mess because of Government dogma. It was they who relaxed restrictions which resulted in the production of contaminated animal feed.

With heads firmly in the sand, Government vets obstinately refused to recognise the danger signals of BSE until it was too late.

They were more concerned with "protecting" our beef industry by declaring that the meat was "perfectly safe".

Alarm bells should have rung when America banned British beef eight years ago.

But no. Our Government still refused to acknowledge there could be a link between BSE and the human equivalent CJD.

And when the possibility of a link was conceded, contaminated offal from infected beasts continued to enter the food chain because of a failure to quickly impose regulations.

This was followed by a failure to effectively police regulations once they were in place.

Lives are in the balance. Yet for reasons known only to itself, the Government continued to put up a smoke screen.

Did it hope the problem would simply disappear? And when Britain was finally hauled ignominiously before the European Union to sort out the shambles, Mr Major dug his heels in firmly and refused to budge.

He has won Britain no supporters by holding Brussels virtually to ransom for four weeks with his policy of non-co-operation.

And yesterday he did us no favours by caving in and accepting a package forced upon him by the EU.

Yet at the end of it, he still has the gall to claim victory.

What a load of tripe.

All this could have been avoided had the Government taken the issue seriously in the first place, and acted immediately and effectively once BSE was identified. Not having done this they should at least have been spurred into decisive action when a possible link between BSE and CJD was acknowledged.

At times like this, Labour leader Tony Blair's plan for an independent food agency seems like a vote winner.

He wants a totally independent body, free from the farming and manufacturing lobbies.

There is no way of knowing whether such an agency could have headed off the BSE crisis.

But any action would be better than that taken by the present Government.

All it's doing is attempting to shut the stable door after the mad cows have bolted.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.