Heavy Mittal GM..

Published on Monday 18 February 2002 00:00

TONY Blair appears to have been crossing his fingers and hoping that the Mittal scandal will just go away.

But his attempts to simply dismiss this affair as "Garbagegate" have failed miserably.

Instead of slipping down the agenda, each new twist and turn of the saga has just heightened concerns about his personal role in helping Lakshmi Mittal to secure backing to buy his Romanian steelworks.

The controversy has even reached the point where not just the opposition but his own backbenchers are now calling for an inquiry.

So even members of his own party are wondering what - other than a 125,000 donation - could have motivated Mr Blair to take the unusual step of personally aiding this foreign businessman.

And particularly worrying is a picture published today which joins the dots between Labour, Mr Mittal and the Hinduja brothers at the centre of the cash-for-passports scandal. The picture includes the shamed former Foreign Office minister Keith Vaz.

Perhaps the fact that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development had recommended the 70 million loan to Mr Mittal and Britain merely backed this is not the most damning aspect of the affair.

Rather more alarming is that it has emerged Mr Mittal spent more than 400,000 in the United States lobbying for import tariffs which were directly against the interests of the British steel industry.

Mr Mittal also owes a string of British companies money after the collapse of his Irish steel plant last year, and almost 500,000 in unpaid VAT.

How should these companies feel about Labour receiving money from Mr Mittal when they have not?

Perhaps they will be among the 60 per cent of people who, according to an opinion poll, now believe that the Labour Party is even more ridden with sleaze than the Tories were before the 1997 election.

Caveats about the reliability of opinion polls aside, this has to be worrying news for Labour. It may have four years to repair the damage before the next general election, but it will go to the polls in Scotland only next year.

Mr Blair must now do the decent thing and come clean about his and the Labour party’s links to Mr Mittal.

And the first thing he should do to restore public confidence is to repay Mr Mittal’s 125,000 donation to the party.

GENETICALLY modified organisms are often portrayed as threatening to the environment and our health.

But it appears that these understandable fears over the unknown that is GM may be blinding us to the potential benefits of the technology.

One which we cannot afford to ignore is the potential to eradicate tooth decay which has been developed by scientists in Florida.

A minor tweak to the bacteria in our mouths is all it may to take to banish tooth decay completely, which would be great news for mankind, and Scotland in particular.

A one-off treatment with a genetically modified mouthwash would take five minutes to give lifelong protection.

This advance now merits further research to ascertain its future potential.

But perhaps more importantly, this illustrates that the debate on GM technology has to move on.

It is now impossible to put the GM genie back in the bottle.

We should now proceed carefully and cautiously towards harnessing the benefits it can bring.