WHETHER or not the case against the first person prosecuted for flouting the government's beef-on-the-bone ban collapsed on a legal technicality, as Agriculture Minister Dr Jack Cunningham maintains, is not the main point of this controversy.

Rather it is that the government is perceived as ordering people about with an over-the-top regulation that lacks respect.

And what is worse, it is trying to do it with an unenforceable law as well.

This was made plain by the ruling of Sheriff James Paterson when, speaking of its "manifest absurdity," he threw out the case against hotelier Jim Sutherland who flagrantly hosted a beef-on-the-bone dinner.

It is, however, typical of the over-prescriptive attitude that accompanied the introduction of the ban last December that Dr Cunningham will not now relent.

The ban - stupid, bossy and useless - stays. It is all very well Dr Cunningham insisting that it is essential for the protection of public health - ostensibly to reduce the risk of people contracting CJD, the human equivalent of mad cow disease.

But, as is evident from the scientific advice given to the minister and the less strict options available to him, the risk is minimal if not infinitesimal.

And people are quite capable of making their own minds up over it, without an interfering government doing it for them.

The government, after all, permits such freedom in many other instances and ones in which health risks to people are both much greater and acknowledged - with the consumption of alcohol and the use of tobacco, for example.

And, apart from continuing to inflict extra harm on the already-hammered meat trade in grimly clinging to his excessive beef-on-the-bone ban, Dr Cunningham is made to look not just a fool, but an arrogant one.

He is asking for the chop.

But this stupid ban should get it first.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.