The buzz of hyperbole once again fills the air in the debate over what the tabloids have dubbed ‘the bra wars’. As usual, politicians on all sides have been quick to leap on the bandwagon, with Tory MEPs trying to pin the blame entirely on Peter Mandelson and the Telegraph pretending that it’s all the fault of “the EU’s protectionist camp”, an invented conglomeration of countries that apparently “compelled the European Commission” to impose this “botched policy” on the rest of us.

While it’s nice to see the hideously Eurosceptic Telegraph admit that the Commission can be “compelled” to do anything by EU member states — it usually likes to paint the Commission as a maveric dictatorship bullying governments into submission — unfortunately it’s still managed to get it wrong. In fact, I was astonished to find that it’s the Daily Mail (admittedly via Reuters) that gets closest to the truth of what’s really going on here:

“The June deal, which capped growth in 10 lines of Chinese textile exports at 8-12 percent a year, was hailed at the time as a sensible response to a deluge of low-cost clothes from China following the scrapping of global textile quotas on January 1.”

The essence of the problem is this. With the end of the so-called multi-fibre agreement this year, we all knew that China would quickly come to dominate the world textiles market with a big rise in its exports. To address these fears, the EU agreed a transitional system of quotas, increasing gradually year-on-year, which would make these changes manageable. The system was neither particularly protectionist nor ultra-liberal, but was agreed by all and sundry, including by EU countries and by China itself.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can indeed debate whether the levels agreed were too strict or too lax. But that has little to do with the problem which has now landed in Peter Mandelson’s lap. This problem arises primarily from the problem of what to do with stock which was ordered from China before the new quota came into force but wasn’t delivered until afterwards.

With Mr Mandelson promising to sort this out by the end of the week, I’m doing my best to keep concerned constituents up-to-date on the situation.