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Authentic Polish Haggis

• Robert Peston
• 14 Feb 07, 07:00 AM

A world-beating haggis factory yesterday gave me a glimpse of Britain's economic frailties.

For the past couple of days I've been in Scotland recording interviews for a documentary on the health of the Scottish private sector to be broadcast on Radio 4 towards the end of March.

This took me to , just outside Edinburgh. In disinfected white Wellington boots and hygienic hairnet, I watched skilled workers manufacture their award-winning Caledonian delicacy. It is a third-generation family business, which turns over more than 拢2m a year and supplies Selfridges, Harrods and Tesco, among others.

Their classic haggis is made to a family recipe in the traditional way: the casing is ox intestine.

But for health and safety reasons, it's becoming harder and harder to find the authentic viscera. Ever since the in Britain, domestic bovine intestines have been on the banned list. And Macsween is also prohibited from buying the stuff from any country where there has been a suspected BSE outbreak.

The result is a dwindling number of countries able to supply Macsween and a cost for the guts which is becoming steeper and steeper.

These days Jo Macsween - grand-daughter of the founder - has to go all the way to to purchase the long white intestinal strips, which look like woollen stockings, because she is simply not allowed to buy them in most wealthier and more developed countries.

I was impressed that she takes enormous pains to ensure that she is buying a healthy product. But there is something counter-intuitive about food safety rules that force her to scour far flung corners of the world in order to make this quintessentially Scottish food.

Are the rules rational? Would there really be a risk to health if locally-sourced intestine were used now that our herd is BSE free?

I am not suggesting there is anything wrong with Uruguayan innards. But I cannot help but wonder whether some of the countries where Macsween is allowed to buy intestine are only viewed as disease-free because their monitoring systems leave something to be desired.

The broad issue here is whether some consumer-protection regulation leads to irrational and sub-optimal results.
Would a delicately calibrated risk-based analysis really conclude that Uruguayan salt-preserved intestine is safer than British?

And, as another recent example, was there a meaningful risk to health from those that didn't contain the standard nut-allergy warning? Was all the waste precipitated by the product recall really necessary, or are we in the grips of an officially sanctioned national hysteria that transforms improbable outcomes into real and present dangers?

Then there's Macsween's workforce. Guess what? A fair number are Poles, who are adored by Jo Macsween.

She lauds them as well educated, meticulous, thrifty and hardworking.

By contrast her experience of local unemployed young Scots is disappointing. If out of work for any length of time, she says they are typically unenthusiastic, unreliable and unproductive. If she can avoid employing them - which she can thanks to the arrival of the Poles - then she does.

The alleged shortcomings in the way that many in the UK bring up their children, as highlighted by , may not be unrelated to the dysfunction of young unemployed adults. The story told by Macsween's haggis, cased in Uruguayan guts and made by Poles, should prompt us to ask whether our regulations, the way we bring up children and our educational system are burdens or boons in the life-or-death global economic battles ahead.

Update 10:39 AM: Just to clarify...

What I am talking about here is the unintended consequences of well-meaning regulations. Obviously in this case I am looking specifically at legal and regulatory risks related to food safety (and not health and safety at work, for example).

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