Re: Good luck with that
He's not Tim Worstall, no, but I am.
Bendy bananas.
It is actually true that the law stated that Class I bananas for direct human consumption must be free of excessive curvature. Breaching this was a criminal offence punishable by up to 6 months in jail and or a £5,000 fine.
That's not a myth at all.
The EU's defence of this was as follows. There exist industry standards as to what is Class I,Class II and so on. There are industry standards on all sorts of things, obviously enough. I even wrote one myself, the standardised scandium contract for the Minor Metals Traders Association.
Some part of the UN collects all those from the food industry into the Codex Alimentarus. This is entirely sensible. People trying to get into the industry can go look the standards up. Great.
The EU then went that one step further. They said that the industry standards must become, in detail, law. This is very stupid indeed.
Using the common law approach would be sensible. "If you say you're Class I 'nananananas and you're not then that's lying in trade which is an offence" and why not?
Saying that, "in the law, here's the entire and total definition currently used by industry and it's a criminal offence to do anything different" is stupid. Say people want to start eating not Cavendish but some or other of the hundreds of types of 'nanas? Which have more curvature? Say someone even just thinks about importing some to see? It's now necessary to go change the law in 28 countries plus a number of devolved administrations. Yes, the law must both be in Welsh and passed by the Senned.
What have we just done therefore? We set in stone the regulatory system as it was when written. We've entirely - because changing the law in 28 countries just to try an experiment and see if there's demand isn't going to work - closed off any adaptations, changes, moderations in those regulations.
The common law approach - if you say you meet Codex Alimentarus standards then you should - means that experimentation, growth, etc are possible. Because they can be changed just the once. Worth recalling that at some point, as a clone, the Cavendish is going to go the way of the Gros Michel and we'll all be eating some other cultivar.
The transposition of industry standards, in detail, into law entirely removes any adaptability. And we live in a world of changing tastes, changing technologies, therefore adaptability is the one thing that we must have.
Bendy bananas is actually a perfect example of the problem with EU regulation. It really is true that bendy bananas were a criminal offence. Then there's the claims from the EU that oh no they weren't. Followed by their complete incomprehension of the actual problem. We shouldn't have detailed, written, rules and laws at this level of detail. We need to regulate at a higher level of abstraction because we must have more adaptability in those details than using the legal system allows.
As I say, the perfect example of EU regulation. And why we must leave of course. Having the anal retentives writing the detailed rules which govern an economy of 500 million people just doesn't work over time. Therefore we shouldn't do that. The EU does and always will - Ceterum Censeo Unionem Europeam Esse Delendam.