THE accumulated wisdom of Lord Haskins, as summarised in the various things he has said to the media in the past week, does not appear to amount to much.

Clearly as the man who has made Northern Foods into the successful company it is today, the government's rural recovery co-ordinator is a clever man, and perhaps a good farmer too. But he would appear to be in desperate need of a course in basic public relations before he takes on such a sensitive role.

Over the last six days, he has gone out of his way to get up the noses of farmers with a series of public utterances which are stunning in their crassness. Comparing British farmers to their French counterparts was not going to win him friends. To say that French farmers were more willing to get second jobs was simply wrong and to then suggest that British farmers were too dependent on hand-outs when their French colleagues extract twice as much from the Common Agricultural Policy was laughable.

The use of the term "hand-out" in this debate is an interesting one. It is highly pejorative and designed to cast the recipient in an unfavourable light. The hand-outs every mother receives in the form of child benefit are not described so and neither are the range of tax incentives offered to companies, including Northern Foods. If motherhood and business are thought worthy of support from the public purse why not farming - especially at a time when it is on its knees?

Behind Mr Haskins' inappropriate language is a sound argument. There is a consensus that subsidies tied to production should end. That is the root cause of the problem with the Common Agricultural Policy, which everyone says should be reformed but is proving to be a task fiendishly difficult to accomplish (thanks to the French, ironically). But Lord Haskins is fooling himself and many others if he thinks farming can continue in the medium term without some support.

Although Downing Street distanced itself from some of Lord Haskins' remarks this week, there is a feeling that perhaps he has not been the "loose canon" he appears and he is in fact acting to orders. Following on from the stories about farmers deliberately infecting their stock (still in the main hearsay) and the size of compensation payments, there is a feeling that the government is engaged in a general campaign to discredit farmers.

Perhaps ministers have now got an idea of the total cost of the FMD tragedy and is seeking to make public opinion more amenable to reducing support for the farming community

That may appear fanciful but stranger things have happened