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Our Glorious European Union!

My, God, doesn\’t it make you proud? The way in which nearly 500 million consumers are protected from the evils that global capitalism would force upon them? Truly, we should be grateful for the hard work all those tens of thousands of highly paid politicians, with their associate mandarins and mistresses, assistants and arselickers (where those classes can be distinguished) do to protect us from such perils. Seriously, just think where we might be without that shared sovereignty, without that pulling together to make Europe a larger voice in world affairs!

A wholesaler has been banned from selling a consignment of kiwi fruits because EU laws deemed them too small.

A serious and heinous danger, don\’t you think?

Inspectors from the Rural Payments Agency, an executive agency of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), made a random check on his stall, and found a number of his kiwis weighed 58g, four grams below the required minimum of 62g.
Mr Down said that 4g in weight was the equivalent of about one millimeter in diameter.

The horrrors, the horrors! Now clearly this is indeed the appropriate action of a super.state: just think what could happen if fruit that was 1 mm too small in diamter was allowed to be sold? Or even given away?

"This fruit will now go to waste at a time when we are all feeling the pinch from rising prices." He said there would also be the environmental cost of taking the fruits to a landfill site.

Mr Down said he was not permitted by law to give away the kiwis to a school or hostel and faced a fine of several thousand pounds if he did.

Makes me want to march out and give them more power, no, really, it does. Let us heap them with honours for protecting us in such a manner, allow them to carry on with no further oversight of check from our own national political systems. For who could doubt that everything is for the best here? That rule by petti-fogging bureaucrats is indeed in our own interests?

Hmm, what\’s that? What would actually happen if these laws were not in place?

Well, I expect that adults would be able to engage in voluntary exchange according to their own desires actually. And clearly we can\’t have that now, can we?

Please, can we leave yet? And on our way out, can we leave some strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees, fruit for the crows to pluck?

 

9 thoughts on “Our Glorious European Union!”

  1. So Much For Subtlety

    Well I suppose if the bastards weren’t busy regulating the size of kiwi fruits they would be doing something really awful. Like writing school text books or banning Islamophobia.

    But it is not much of a reason not to have them all killed. Even if the lynching metaphor is a little distasteful.

  2. This is the sort of thing Europhiles are always witering on about being ‘tabloid scares’ and ‘euromyths’. (I remember in the 90s there were stories like this every other day in the newspapers).

    They’re fuckwits.

  3. To be fair, the EU is fuckwit writ large, but you really have to be a class A wanker to actually enforce these rules.

  4. Laws are enforced here because historically (most) laws have been (mostly) perceived to be (mostly)reasonable by the general population.

    European bureaucracy is something else entirely – a bit like Japanese knotweed: an alien plant imported as ornamental and useful, that turns into a pernicious weed because it has no natural enemies.

    This puts us at a disadvantage compared to, say, the French, who long ago realised one can ignore stupid rules with relative impunity.

  5. Err, you know that laws on minimum size, weight and quality for agricultural produce existed long before we joined the EU, right?

    (QuestionThat wins extra points, for citing a tabloid Euromyth scare story as evidence that people who point out that tabloid Euromyth scare stories are usually nonsense are fuckwits…)

  6. Johnb, there may indeed have been such laws before we joined the EU. So what? That does not make them good.

    There should be no such laws. All that is necessary is to enforce laws against fraud, so if a grocer wants to flog me X lbs of spuds, that is what I get, and no more or less.

  7. ”Err, you know that laws on minimum size, weight and quality for agricultural produce existed long before we joined the EU, right?”

    Maybe, but at least when they were UK laws we could have them repealed.

  8. Eva:

    Got no idea of what Japanese knotweed is or what it looks like. But it’s in the news recently as a principal source of the longevity substance, resveratrol.

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