EU integration: a shaggy horse story

31/08/2013

I've been running Syria stories for three days running now, each of them being highly critical of the Conservative leader, Mr Cameron. And the strange thing is that I haven't had a single e-mail telling me I'm overdoing the criticism and should leave the man alone.

Nevertheless, just to be on the safe side, I've changed the tempo, picking up on a "new crisis" on horsemeat that has supposedly has hit northern Europe. What's more, the French Farmers Union says the Belgian Mafia is behind it.

It involves riding horses, which may have been treated with drugs so rendering them unfit for human consumption, which were sold from a stable to a man who promised to give them a retirement home.

Horror of horrors, though, they were not given slippers, cups of warm cocoa and places by the fireside. Instead, they were trucked to Belgium, their health passports were changed and they were then returned to France to be slaughtered for human consumption.

After the abattoir became suspicious about the horses documents, the proprietor complained to the authorities and investigators are now targeting a jockey based in the Ardennes region of eastern France.

The owner of the stables where the animals came, Arnaux Ravaux, also had doubts: "We realized that the explanations were the same every time. Once the horses had left, we had no more news from this man, and when we did manage to get hold of him, the animals were always either dead or victims of heart attacks".

But the real gem of this story comes with the punchline from euronews which tells us that in countries where eating horse is common, "this case underlines the need for a Pan European system of health controls".

So there we have it. When a jockey working for the Belgian Mafia buys up retired horses and forges new passports for them. Then, instead of feeding them hot cocoa, he flogs them off to French abattoirs to make horse meat. And that means we need more European political integration.  I bet you thought we really needed it to stop the Germans invading France – or vice versa.

In the meantime, it seems, City of London plod have admitted that, back in May, they actually arrested two men on the horsemeat scandal, and held them on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud. They interviewed another two men under caution. And, we are reliably, informed, there wasn't a ring of stars in sight.