The noose closes round British government

Open Europe has released the Presidency's list of unfinished business to be dealt with once the Constitution has been smuggled through.

As well as terms and conditions for the President and the Foreign Minister, it includes the structure, operation and field of action of Europol, the new powers and operation of Eurojust ("We could compel the British police to make a prosecution"), the rules governing the European Public Prosecutor and its functions, and the powers of the new sinister-sounding "Operational Committee on Internal Security", or COSI. (The portentous apparatus for common defence and foreign policies will probably prove an expensive farce.)

The final blueprint for COSI's extensive powers has yet to be finalised, however. Negotiations on the issue will take place in the second half of this year - after the planned ratification of the Treaty in the House of Commons, meaning MPs will not know what they have signed up to. Talks on COSI will be held in secret. Waterfield cites leaked internal EU documents, circulated almost three years ago which admitted that "the exact nature of the committee cannot be discerned by reading" the relevant clause of the Treaty - and no new work to clarify the issue has been carried out since.

Tony Bunyan, of the Statewatch civil liberties group, has warned that if the Government "gets its way we will see an EU Interior Ministry without any democratic control. It is quite outrageous that the role of the new EU internal security committee is being decided in secret. If COSI becomes a high-level legislative body, as well being in charge of operational matters, a whole swathe of decision-making and practice will be removed from democratic debate and discussion."

Open Europe also picks up a Handelsblatt report that "the Commission is holding back plans for controversial legislation until after the revived Constitutional Treaty has been ratified. Plans to harmonise Europe's corporate tax base are also being held back.

"The controversial Health Directive will be reintroduced only once ratification is complete, as both the UK and Ireland are opposed." And we already know a group of cancer specialists have for some reason called for EU involvement in cancer care in Europe ... as if we were to be ruled by all-wise philosopher kings.

But they were only ever a doctrinaire philosophers' ignorant fantasy. Our new politburo believe in "Global Warming", Kyoto and biofuels. Nothing seems to attract their regulatory zeal like obsolete or half-understood science.

And there will be nothing we can do about it. Just pay the ever increasing - and largely pointless - bills, as our freedom drains away.

REACH directive in its final shape

So the final shape of the REACH directive is becoming clear. Good? No, says Richard North.

Based on the idea of "prior approval" it means that, once it is up and running, no chemical can be sold unless its producers have complied with a bureaucratic procedure which will attest as to its "safety".

The trouble is that, beyond acute toxicity, predictive modelling is a very poor indicator of safety, an issue we explored in detail last June and in November last year. Thus, approvals based on this process merely insulate producers from their responsibilities to their customers, crating a system where it is the regulator and not the consumer who must be satisfied before a product is marketed.

UK opposes REACH

An interesting take on the REACH directive (which I've discussed here and here) in The Independent, which claims that "Ministers are sabotaging laws to control toxic chemicals despite fears that they are causing a "silent epidemic" of brain disorders in British children".

The article explains that

The law is the first attempt to regulate more than 100,000 chemicals in use in Europe. There is little or no safety information on 85 per cent of the ones in common use: the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals (Reach) directive aims to get companies to carry out safety tests on chemicals - and to control the most dangerous ones.

Researchers are claiming various chemicals in common use are dangerous, but nowhere does the article consider the question of quantities.

Of course it is all a cynical plot -

Britain originally supported Reach, but after lobbying by the Bush administration - which fears it will damage US exports - it switched to denouncing it as "dangerously wrong".

The implication is that no body will stop manufacturers using chemicals which have been shown to be dangerous. This is surely nonsense, especially as regards food in supermarkets.

If regulators aren't doing their job, the solution is not to create a new expensive regulator.

Britain has persuaded Europe's governments to resist the measure. If no deal is reached, the entire directive is likely to be abandoned.

So the French just rolled over to protect imports from the US? Pull the other one.

REACH directive again

Richard North notes that the REACH directive (Registration Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) has been picked up by a US commentator at The Corner. That American writer initially follows The Telegraph's report by focusing on Cameron (surely its least interesting aspect), but then notes that

The REACH directive would have severe consequences for American businesses too, which is why this issue is important here. The EU is seeking to regulate for the US too - this is one particularly outrageous example. Cameron's pusillianimity on such a serious economic issue is exceptionally disappointing. It looks like both HM Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry will become mere branches of the Environment Ministry in any Cameron government.

Of course, as we have seen before, the unelected officials of the EU glory in their ability to lead the world in regulation. These few bureaucrats can create and force through hugely expensive dirigiste directives based on dodgy science - and because they are mandatory for one of the world's biggest economies, importers across the world have to comply, and the regulations become de facto standards for manufacturing across the world.

This is the aspect which Mr Murray in the US has failed to understand. It won't be Mr Cameron's environment minister who calls the shots, but the Brussels bureaucracy.

We know already that thousands of animals will die in this retrospective testing of chemicals which have no known ill effects (or they would have been banned already). We also knew already that this was the brainchild of Mr Meacher (another strong indicator of loopiness). We can now add to the picture from The Telegraph's report.

Melvyn Whyte, the chief executive of Whyte Chemicals, a distribution company, said the proposal was "arduous and expensive and not necessarily effective".

He said REACH rules were 1,200 pages long with 6,000 pages of guidance to companies about how to comply.

REACH directive fundamentally flawed

The other day I highlighted the REACH & RoHS directives as examples of spectacularly bad regulation. A letter to the FT today attacks the logic at the heart of REACH. The writers say

The concepts behind Reach are fundamentally flawed and thus the proposal cannot be fixed. It should be rejected outright. The programme's "substitution principle", which prevailed in the environment committee draft, is one example. It is based on the idea that regulation can prompt industry to find products that are superior to "dangerous products".

If the substitutes were really superior, they would prevail in the marketplace. Mandated substitutes are usually not used voluntarily because they carry trade-offs - higher prices, reduced product quality and increased level of product failures. In some cases, mandated substitutes are actually more dangerous.

The banning of DDT offers an example of why we should not trust regulators to mandate substitution. This pesticide was banned in many places based on faulty information about its health risks and because people assumed that substitute controls like bed nets could do as well to fight malaria. After DDT use halted, malaria rates skyrocketed and millions of people have died from the disease every year since. Some nations are returning to DDT use for malaria control, but it is tragic that so many people have to die first. The Reach programme, unfortunately, shows that policymakers still have not learnt from that tragic mistake.

This is not a complete argument - it might be a legitimate aim to rebalance the calculation by making safety issues more important. DDT, for instance, is not without its disadvantages. But the writers are probably right to suggest that this process is much too cumbersome.

As I suggested before, many rabbits will agree. So will many more bosses, in time.