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.

A treaty to make bad EU regulation easier

This blog has long argued that people favouring a referendum on the EU constitutional treaty should stop dancing with David Miliband on the head of a pin swapping chants claiming the treaty is or is not a constitution.

This battlefield suits him well. People may say they would like a referendum on an EU document, but whether it is or it isn't a constitution won't rank very high in their concerns, and they would be hard pressed to explain exactly what the distinction was.

Miliband has yet to face simple but much harder questions - such as

• What is the treaty for?
  
  
• How does it benefit Britain?

Let's keep this broadbrush. One aim of the treaty is to make it easier for the EU to make rules. So it's reasonable to ask, Do our foreign rulemakers make a good job of regulating our lives?

For instance, there are the Directives on the Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) which Booker demolished over a year ago and Richard North has returned to today. Appliances are failing because they are now banned from using lead - which wasn't dangerous in the first place anyway.

And it seems the rule banning standby mode in appliances may be aimed at the wrong target, as this blog mentioned the other day.

How do EU rules like this get made? Blair seems to have been casually bounced into the rule phasing out conventional lightbulbs, an execrable example of his sofa government lite. Booker reminds us today that

The supposed "low energy" bulbs the EU wants to make compulsory simply cannot work in many enclosed light fittings without overheating, and to replace those fittings would in Britain alone cost billions of pounds.

And a Telegraph reader writes that "the cost and energy required to make low energy bulbs are higher than any that might be saved by their use".

They do things differently in the States. A global warming bill sponsored by two US senators has been analysed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Its proposals would cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion in its first 10 years. The EPA estimates that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will be 718 parts per million by 2095 - and if the bill is passed, CO2 levels would be 695 ppm, a reduction of 23 ppm. This is out in the public domain for people to consider, and they can calculate that this expenditure of trillions of dollars might reduce average global temperature by as much as 0.18 degrees Celsius.

But what are the costs and benefits of the EU lightbulb policy?

In terms of the referendum campaign and the constitutional treaty, it's important to keep in mind that the argument isn't that we need to leave the EU. That's what opponents of a referendum claim the argument is.

The case against the treaty is different. It would make it easier for the EU to bring in new rules. Even if they were all good rules, there would be implications for civil liberties and democracy. But in fact some of the regulation is spectacularly bad. So the onus is on supporters of the treaty to explain why it would be good for the UK to make EU regulation easier.

One more example of EU regulation. Last year I blogged an EU proposal that drivers in the EU should have to keep their headlights on in daytime, and asked, "should this be an issue for the EU in the first place? Whatever happened to subsidiarity?"

Matthew Engel has picked up the issue in the Financial Times, under the heading "Brussels' glaring stupidity". He concentrates on how such rules come about.

There has been discussion of this issue for some years now, but this is discussion of a very EU-ish kind, ie hardly anyone has heard about it. There has been consultation involving (Gawd, how I hate this word) “stakeholders”, usually meaning groups that can afford lobbyists. And there was a two-month period in 2006 when individuals could respond. Population of the EU: 495 million. Number of respondents: 117.

He questions the projected reduction in accident figures: fatalities are falling anyway, and the law will increase dazzle and glare. Oh, and cars’ carbon dioxide usage will go up by between 0.3% and 1.5%.

The main concern, he says, is democracy. "Yes, there is debate, but it is so removed from the ordinary voter that 99 per cent of the population are likely to hear nothing until the law is passed – and maybe not even then." The 117 respondents were overwhelmingly against the change. The British government opposes the headlights plan, he says, but "is fatalistic about being forced to agree.

"Even the European Commission admits the idea is far less appropriate in the south than the north – so why pass a blanket law?"

He concludes that -

Britain may be wrong. This much is certain: as inappropriate, barely debated new regulations cover the continent, so alienation from the European project increases.

In such little ways, Europe sows the seeds of its own eventual collapse.

And this is the process which the constitutional treaty would make easier.

EU to cost consumers yet more money

Or, as Christopher Booker asked, is this the craziest EU law of all? We're going to hear a lot about the RoHS directive over coming months. Well, we should. It comes into force today. As Booker says:

Designed to protect the environment and human health, this law is imposing costs of tens of billions of pounds on businesses, not only in Europe but across the world.

It is based, it now turns out, on scientific studies so flawed that it will only cause further damage to both the environment and health. It will also result in products which the EU itself admits will be less reliable than those we have now.

It turns out that the problem the directive was aiming to solve never existed. And the EU's remedy for this non-existent problem will lead to goods which are more expensive and less reliable.

Orgalime, a Europe-wide body representing the electronics industry, estimates the additional costs of this directive at £44 billion a year in the EU alone (adding maybe £30 to the price of a PC). The DTI very conservatively estimates the cost in the UK at £1.3 billion. A US study shows that compliance will cost its exporters £2 billion. The costs to Far Eastern economies, from which much of our electronics are imported, will be greater still.

And not only more expensive, but also inferior:

It also emerges that the EU has introduced its new law without checking the properties of the substitute materials that must now be used all over the world. Not only are the new soldering alloys much more energy-intensive; studies have shown that they are likely to pose a greater risk to human health where equipment is dismantled for recycling, much of this in China and other developing countries where precautions are likely to be minimal.

There is also serious doubt over the reliability of the new materials. The use of tin-based solders alone, it is predicted, means that computers will break down more often. The EU itself tacitly recognises this by exempting military equipment from the ban on the grounds that the alternative technology cannot be trusted.

As Booker concludes:

We may simply marvel that one of the most expensive and damaging laws ever passed by the EU was dreamed up on the basis of a scientific blunder which had already come to light before the law came into force, and that, as it now emerges, was never remotely necessary.

At this point any rational organisation would have put its hands up and said, Sorry, we got it wrong. Gunter Verheugen has claimed that he wants to abolish unnecessary regulation. Here is a regulation that is not only unnecessary but actually positively harmful. But has he stopped it? No.

The government and the Conservatives also seem unconcerned about this extra and wholly unnecessary burden on the British people. So has UKIP been waging a structured campaign on this, highlighting the issue to consumers and business?

Er ... no. The UKIP web site doesn't offer a search function. And a Google search produces no references to RoHS on the party's web site at all.