On the day that the coalition government has announced details of the "cull of the quangoes" and the resulting loss of thousands of meaningless jobs, as I write this I am at the same time wondering this - How in the hell did the Food Standards Agency get away scot free?!

Yes, for sure I've got a vested interest in making such a statement, but it comes after decades of controversial disputes with the aforementioned agency and its predecessors.

Ever since the Food Standards Agency (FSA), and before it, the Meat Hygiene Service(MHS), came into being in the early 1990's, a virtual crusade of debilitation, defamation and destablisation against abattoir owners such as myself has ensued with unprecedented ferocity.

Why?

Simple, really. Money.

As an example of a "Next-Step Agency" designed to save tax -payers money, and which dates back to Maggie Thatcher's time, the MHS was set up to deal with inspection requirments in the abattoir sector, and in doing so replaced a role carried out hitherto by local authorities. It can be argued that this was welcomed by many abattoir operators at the time as a way of removing apparent charging anomalies between different LA's. In truth, a prospective MHS was welcomed by big industry operators as a way of removing a swathe of small to medium operators because of cost, and so a great divide between large and small slaughterhouses was born, which unfortunately exists to this day.

Divide and rule. Bureaucrats could have designed this old saying, and the MHS and FSA have perpetuated this state of affairs with ruthless determination. And indeed, it is because of their success in this field that the fresh meat industry now finds itself in such a desperate situation as the unsustainable climate of full cost recovery comes ever nearer.

It is quite clear to me that those of us who actually run abattoirs, i.e. the trade, though, must take full responsibility for the status quo. We haved repeatedly allowed ourselves to be bullied by trade unions and bureaucrats as people unfit to run our own industry and who cannot be trusted. This is irksome enough, but the biggest mistake we've made is to not confront bogus health claims made by vested official interests; a big yellow streak running down industry's spine has repeatedly allowed health officials to claim that that what they do in their abattoir inspections actually "protects public health". Over 50 viewpoints over many years on my website explain why this is not the case so, but again, we ,the trade, have not had the insight, or nerve, or belief, to confront the perpetrators and stand our ground on an issue that,left unchallenged, will bring us down. You reap what you sow.

Toby Baker