It comes and it goes and it gives the Government an opportunity to bash teachers yet again. If you don't have an overwhelming majority for a one-day strike, the Government will say that the union is driven by lunatics."Instead, the union's executive is to put an emergencymotion to the conference tomorrow calling for a ballot of members on a work to rule and on a refusal to take on extra work caused by the new scheme. Today delegates are to debate a motion threatening local strikes if teachers are forced to "snoop" on their colleagues when they are assessed for the £2,000 pay rise. Mr McAvoy refused to specify what form the work to rule might take.He said the union remained implacably opposed to the principle of performance-related pay.
"I cannot conceive a day when the NUT will embrace it, particularly the element of payment by results."However, it would be wrong, he added, for the union's members to forgo the opportunity of a pay rise while the campaign is in progress. The union has sent out 120,000 letters to members it believes are eligible, arguing that they should apply for the new threshold test unless they have good personal reasons for not doing so.Mr McAvoy said: "We have told them to make the decision themselves and not to listen to those who are saying they should not apply as a political gesture. There is no conflict between this and our opposition to the principle."Members are also receiving advice from the union on how to fill out their applications for the money.The union argues that every teacher deserves a £2,000 pay rise whether or not they have passed the threshold test.. The growing French epidemic of BSE can be traced directly to farmers fattening their cattle with potentially contaminated feed that was officially banned in 1991, according to official investigations. The growing French epidemic of BSE can be traced directly to farmers fattening their cattle with potentially contaminated feed that was officially banned in 1991, according to official investigations. Paris justified its flouting of European Union rules to maintain the ban on British beef last month by arguing that it had a duty to take "extreme precautions" to protect human health.
But there is now mounting evidence that the French government's own measures against bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) are inadequate and loosely enforced.Inquiries by French government vets have shown a "probable or possible" connection between all recent cases of the disease in France and the use of compound animal feed containing the ground-up remains of cattle. Officially, the findings are secret but they have been leaked to the newspaper Le Figaro and confirmed to The Independent by a source in the French food safety agency, the AFSSA.Such feed, blamed for the vastly greater BSE epidemic in Britain, has been banned as cattle fodder in both countries since 1991. It has been banned from animal feed of all kinds in Britain since 1996, when it was realised that cattle were still being fed on contaminated feedstuffs destined for pigs and poultry. Yet it remains legally available in France to feed pigs and poultry. Officials believe that its accidental or deliberate use for cattle explains why the incidence of BSE in France is almost doubling annually.The numbers must be kept in perspective. Contrary to claims by the Conservative Party, there is no "mass" epidemic of BSE across the Channel and there is no credible evidence that some cases are being "hidden".
There have been just over 100 BSE cases in France in eight years, compared with a monumental 180,000 cases in Britain.The fact remains, however, that the number of cases in the United Kingdom is falling rapidly while the disease is "inexplicably" gaining ground in France, where there have been 14 cases already this year, compared with 30 last year and 18 the year before.Last week, the French Agriculture Minister, Jean Glavany, speculated that the advance of the disease might be connected to some unknown "third" method of infection. The only scientifically proved means of transmission are through tainted feed and, in rare cases, through inheritance.However, the leaked findings show that the French government is aware of the likely real cause of the spread of BSE. Each outbreak has been investigated exhaustively by the Ministry of Agriculture's vets. The average period of incubation of BSE is five years; records of food supplied to animals, or available on the farm, have been examined for seven years before the outbreak.The results of these inquiries have been kept secret.
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