The Sketch: Understanding the baffling, bizarre and benign words of Margaret Beckett

Sometimes in Parliament you hear drivel that means something. Yesterday, we got BATNEEC: it's a technical constraint on government regulators. Some of Michael Meacher's more fallible requirements are issued under BATNEEC - which insists on giving us Best Available Technology Not Entailing Excessive Costs.

Minister Meacher is said to be a harmless sort of drudge but he is ultimately answerable to the sinister, supra-ministerial body that goes under the name of Ten Of Society's Sensible Environmental Regulators. Of course, he sounds like them, he speaks their language.

So he enters with gusto into discussion of the Second Sulphur Protocol just as Elliot Morley – Porky to his Pinky – tells us why the Water Bill in the Lords is not meant to be implementing the EU Water Framework Directive.

There is an outside chance that what they're saying means something. By contrast there's Margaret Beckett's drivel.

This is interesting for not meaning anything at all while taking a very long time to issue. Two questions on the order paper were spun out to 20 minutes, a record under the Speaker's new regime.

This is what she said, responding to a question about bio-security. "Of course, there are responsibilities on farmers. There are responsibilities on Government that we are doing our utmost to discharge. But what can never be the case is that it can never be all the responsibility of the farmers with the Government not needing to do anything ... but equally it can never be all the responsibility of Government."

As a statement of the obvious it is unforgiveable. She's a walking tautology. A parliamentary pleonasm. It's what commentators call CACK. I'm not sure what the acronym stands for. If, indeed, it is an acronym at all.

Normally, it doesn't matter. New Labour has no affection for, loyalty to, or interest in the countryside. The work is done by officials whose catastrophic incapacity only comes to light occasionally when animals get sick. Then, instead of following the procedures laid down by the last major report to deal with such a catastrophe, they incinerate everything that moves, up to and including slow-moving government backbenchers and doubters.

So, whenever Mrs Beckett tells us consultations are in progress, or reports are being prepared, or, as she puts it, "a process has been set in train to try and ensure that we build up an understanding of what really is the broad basis of acceptance", as she said the other week, we know what to think. That she's a time-wasting seat-warmer who once ran in a leadership race (We've forgotten what the Labour Party was like a decade ago).

Sometimes it matters more than at others. The Common Agricultural Policy is a great crime against humanity (it's why the Third World is hungry) and to have Mrs Beckett in charge of Britain's response to it is beyond commentary.

"A great deal of work is going on all the time. In general terms we are working to ensure the proposals would be favourable in terms of their combined impact."

Would you take from that that she is for or against urgent and radical reform? She says she is for, but on the basis of such statements we must assume her combined impact will be nothing at all.

Simoncarr75@hotmail.com