Towards an Imperfect Union: A Conservative Case for the EU (Europe Today) by Dalibor Rohac

Author:Dalibor Rohac [Rohac, Dalibor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2016-04-21T22:00:00+00:00

Regulated to Death

Remember the “bent banana” rule—the regulation that supposedly banned the sale of curved bananas in the EU? Although in reality the regulation did not actually “ban” curved bananas, with the help of some eager journalists, it became the epitome of the Brussels bureaucratic apparatus gone mad. But there is more. “If barmy Brussels bureaucrats get their way, baffled Brits will have to ask for hippoglossus instead of plain halibut. . . . Takeaways, restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets are all set to be banned from using names that have been around for centuries,” the Sun reported in 2001.[60] The Daily Express, in turn, warned that “Britain’s lorry drivers’ traditional diet of a full English breakfast is under threat from EU bureaucracy.”[61] In 2014, a Daily Mail headline asked: “Enjoy a yogurt at school? Hard cheese, says EU. Eurocrats want to ban snacks in healthy eating campaign.”[62] Even the conservative broadsheet Daily Telegraph misleadingly reported that “[t]he acre, one of Britain’s historic imperial measurements, is to be banned under a new European directive.”[63]

The reality, as always, was more complicated. The EU did not prescribe the use of Latin names of fish in restaurants or shops but only introduced labeling standards that required disclosing the exact name of the fish, how it was produced, and where it was caught. Neither did the EU ban English breakfasts for truck drivers; it only mandated standards for safety training, including information about food, alcohol and drugs, stress, and the importance of rest for drivers. The story about the supposed “ban on snacks” was in fact about a change in the policies of a modest fund of £8 million, supplied by the EU to breakfast clubs at British schools—not about a ban on yogurts as such. And while the UK Land Registry was indeed scrapping the use of acres in its official records, this was done to reflect the practice that had existed in the UK since 1995.

Still, many European regulations, including the “bent banana” rule,[64] appear patently absurd. The purpose of that particular piece of legislation was to “ensure that the market is supplied with products of uniform and satisfactory quality, in particular in the case of bananas harvested in the Community.” It acknowledges that member countries might already have their own quality standards for bananas. Those will “continue to apply,” but “only at stages subsequent to unripened green bananas, provided those rules are not in conflict with the Community standards and do not impede the free circulation of bananas in the Community.”[65] Bananas in the EU must be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature of the fingers.”[66] While this has been commonly interpreted as banning the sale of curved bananas, the curvature requirement fully applies only to the top-quality, “Extra Class” bananas. Class I and Class II bananas, which are also sold in the EU, can have “defects in shape.” It is not specified how significant those defects can be, but across the three quality categories “the minimum length permitted is 14 cm and the minimum grade permitted is 27 mm.

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