Another solid British family (and their business) destroyed by Euro-fascism

Dateline: 8th July 2002

"It should not go unrecognised that the system of community economic endeavour naturally (!) requires ongoing state Directives in a larger quantity than those to which businessmen in many European states were previously accustomed"
Walther Funk, Reichs Economy Minister & President of the Reichsbank 1942

Having closed down my own production facility because it (1) needed new investment and (2) made a useful, safe product which the EU had twice come near to banning so (3) at 58 I was not prepared to take the risk that a stroke of a pen could make re-investment worthless, I was very sorry to hear of the closure of a long-standing customer of mine in Yorkshire.

I will not name them but I have dealt with three generations of the family. They ran a tight ship, a mill which was up to the standards of anywhere. But they only have one mill. They made both pet foods and farm animal foods. Because of the ban on meat & bone meal in farm animal feeds, they had to get rid of their pet food business because you cannot keep meat & bone meal in a mill which produces feeds for farm animals.

This mill made both cattle & sheep feed and pig & poultry rations. Then the EU then decided that Fish meal must not be used in rations for cattle and sheep, although it is very valuable in feeds for young stock and dairy rations. The reason was that it might be mixed with meat & bone meal although the supply chain in this country is completely separate. Fish meal is an even more valuable component of pig and poultry rations because of the quality of the protein. But unless you have a completely separate system, you cannot bring fish meal into a mill which makes cattle food, although nobody has ever suggested that fish meal is anything other than beneficial in cattle rations(especially those of high quality).

So they have had to close and sell up to a larger firm which has several mills. So, I guess, some thirty people have lost theier jobs and a technically excellent mill has been closed down - on a technicality of no worth to public health or anything else.

Isn't life grand?

The people who ran this business were real people, great characters. The first managing director I knew was about my father's age. "How are you keeping?" I asked him once. "Lad, none of us are any better for keeping " was the reply. Although they changed it of recent years, they were unique in having old age pensioners as telephone operators. Being very Yorkshire, when you asked to be put through to someone, the reply was usually "Hold on a minute young man, I'll put thee through". The MD's wife was known to be very poorly with cancer, so I asked one of these stalwarts how she was' before proceeding to the inner sanctum. "She's not so gradely, Lad. They buried her on Wednesday", was the reply.

We shall not see their like again