Call for a ‘pirates’ egg mark

He has been pressing for assurance that eggs from old-fashioned battery cages will not be allowed into countries which have complied with the requirement to phase them out by the end of this year.

He told Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos in a debate on the subject that the signs were that 83 million illegal eggs would be produced in the EU on the first day of 2012.

And he suggested that the EU should pay for them all to be “stamped with a nice symbol of the skull and crossbones, so that everyone knows where they are”.

He told Commissioner Ciolos: “Somebody has got to get a grip on this.

“British producers have spent £400m of their own money to comply with your regulations.”