The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, attempted to check the slide into a full-scale trade war between Britain and France yesterday, as the British government announced tough new guidelines on food labelling to guarantee the provenance of British products.
Mr Blair insisted he would not take Britain into a "tit for tat war" with France over its decision to ban British beef imports, declaring that such a move would be "illegal" and "suicidal" for British farmers given that Britain's trade with Europe was worth £320 million a day.
After the Conservative leader, Mr William Hague, tried to capitalise on the dispute during Question Time in the Commons by claiming the government knew in June about the practice of feeding of sewage to some French farm animals, Mr Blair angrily denounced Tory demands to ban French meat products as "immature nonsense".
However, Mr Hague stuck to his line of earlier in the week when he accused government ministers of failing to "stick up" for Britain, saying "it is not just the dead cows which have had their spines taken out".
The sense of growing concern over the dispute was fuelled by yesterday's angry exchanges, with the Prime Minister hitting out at Tories, saying they had adopted a stringent position on the dispute "because they have become a single-issue pressure group on Europe".
It was for the French to "get their house in order", Mr Blair said, insisting Britain would not "revisit the old beef war" of the previous Tory government or start an illegal trade war.
The meeting later today of the European Commission's Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) - which will consider whether British beef is safe - was to the forefront of the mind of the Agriculture Minister, Mr Nick Brown, when he insisted the Commission must enforce the SSC's ruling in France if it decided British beef was safe.
"We will look to the Commission to take prompt action to enforce what is, after all, a European Union decision, a collective decision that we have all made and we should all abide by," Mr Brown said.
Earlier, in what was seen as a move to appease British farmers angered by the effect cheaper foreign food imports has had on their livelihood, Mr Brown announced new guidelines governing the labelling of British food. He told a one-day conference in London of the National Farmers' Union that the "British Food Kite-mark" displayed on goods could prevent food products made outside Britain from being labelled as British-made.
At the conference, Mr Brown came under fire after he admitted that he had not spoken to his French counterpart, Mr Jean Glavany, for a week despite the deteriorating Anglo-French trade relationship.
Mr Brown mounted a damage limitation exercise saying on BBC radio that both governments were in constant contact at a diplomatic level.
But the shadow agriculture minister, Mr Tim Yeo, criticised the lack of contact as "just one more item in a catalogue of incompetence, mismanagement and inaction".