18/06/2014
In the ongoing war of words between the EU and its detractors, few weapons have been so powerful as the charge of "over-regulation", providing a never-ending stream of "red-tape" stories for the media to chew over.
Even then, the media tends to speak with forked tongue. As we saw in
yesterday's story, the Commission taking tentative steps to reduce the "red tape" burden in the notoriously over-regulated field of meat inspection has sections of the media immediately start shrieking in protest.
Despite that, the Commission is acutely aware of the cumulative impact of the "red tape" propaganda and in October last launched its
REFIT programme in a bid to convince people that it was responsive to the needs of the business community and was cutting the burden of regulation.
Despite
the rhetoric though, there was a hidden agenda behind the programme, not least the need to integrate international agreements into the
acquis, and to prevent this process being blocked by the European Parliament and the Council.
Nevertheless, that has not stopped the Commission today launching a further
propaganda initiative, in the form of a "Refit scoreboard". This comes complete with a
communication on the "state of play and outlook", backed by a
staff working document and a
Q&A memorandum, all part of the paraphernalia of an EU public relations campaign.
Invariably these days such an initiative includes graphic representation, and this we see illustrated (top - click to expand) in an "infogram" which claims, amongst other things, that, in pursuit of "making EU law lighter, simpler and less costly", more than 6100 legal acts have been repealed since 2005.
The reality, though â as always â is very different. Much of this supposed reduction has been achieved by taking several instruments, and their amendments, and consolidating them into one new law. The net result, with additions, is often longer than the sum of the separate laws, but in propaganda terms, one law has replaced many. Sometimes, as many as 20 or so laws are amalgamated into one new law.
The other trick we picked up was with the vegetable and fruit marketing standards, where laws detailing acceptable sizes and shapes were scrapped altogether for 26 types of produce, including carrots, cauliflowers, cucumbers, leeks, plums and onions.
But what we
actually saw was that the specific standards were replaced by "general marketing standards" (GMS). These were not specified in detail by the EU, but in order to comply with them traders had to apply the relevant UNECE standards, which effective reproduced the marketing standards that had been scrapped. In short, nothing had changed.
Another trick added to the Commission armoury is to list all the
obsolete laws making a virtue out of necessity, parading normal legislative housekeeping as part of a "deregulation" process.
Thus, dropping a proposal (not even a law) for a "Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Regulation (EEC) No 1360/90 establishing a European Training Foundation as regards the Director's term of office", because alternative arrangements had been made, becomes part of the Commission's heroic efforts to reduce "red tape".
Similarly dropped was a "Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the operating space, access to the driving position and the doors and windows of wheeled agricultural or forestry tractors", but this only goes because such matters are now determined by the World Forum for the Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations, hosted by UNECE.
Thus, like so much of what the EU does, this is smoke and mirrors, a series of elaborate procedural devices that have little effect other than to reduce the headline figure of the number of laws produced by the EU.
Meanwhile, the torrent of laws continues apace, concealed in part by the window-dressing, only then to be ignored in its entirety by the British legacy media until harnessed by a
wandering europhile in support of continued membership of the EU.
Our problem is that, without systemic debunking of these propaganda devices, they lie on the table, ready for deployment, and we are left ill-equipped to counter them when they are used against us.
This, in my view, is where UKIP singularly fails. Warning about this sort of thing is what we set out to do in 1999, when we sent three UKIP MEPs to Brussels, using group funds to support the "intelligence" function. Yet, between 2004 and 20014, with â¬16 million spent in group funds, we've seen nothing of this, and still have to go elsewhere for our information.
The EU is fortunate to have such lightweight opposition, enabling it to get away with transparent ploys like "Refit".
FORUM THREAD
