For peat's sake, what is going on in Brussels?

Maurice O'Brien • Published 4 Sep 2009 11:00 0 Comments

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THERE'S this little game of pretence they play in the House of Commons. No, not that one.

I mean the one where they pretend they're legislating and, after a bout of soporific tautology which passes for debate, a bill becomes law. But, I hear you say, it only becomes law once it has Royal Assent.

Now according to www.parliament.uk, which comes complete with a nice portcullis logo to show it's pukka, the granting of Royal Assent means: "After this the bill becomes part of the law of the land and is known as an Act of Parliament."

Oddly enough the 1984 Video Recordings Act got Royal Assent to give us a law controlling video nasties. Everybody, except the sickest of pornographers and a few choice psychos, agreed such a law was a damned good thing.

Only we now discover it's not a law at all because Britain forgot to ask the European Commission for its blessing first. Amid the inevitable party political braying at the incompetence of the Tory government of the day, very few have asked what the hell the legitimacy of such a law has got to do with a bunch of Brussels apparatchiks.

Lest you're wondering it has, of course, absolutely everything to do with them because, with or without referendums or Lisbon constitreaties, ultimate authority over all Euro nations lies in the hands of this despotic cabal.

Meanwhile in Ireland, where they've been ordered to reverse their Lisbon 'no' vote, a community of 20 households in south-west Donegal has been cut off for more than a week by a landslide of 44,000 cubic metres of peat bog sludge.

Rescuers are on stand-by but are prevented from doing anything by Article 6 of the EU Habitats Directive, which insists an ecology report must be published before anyone starts digging. One way or another there's an awful lot of muck needs shifting.

- YOU'D have thought Boy Dave would be trying to shed that ill-advised 'heir to Blair' tag, but not a bit of it. Tony's tall tales began with the four-year-old football fan watching Geordie hero Jackie Milburn, progressed to the 14-year-old tricking his way onto an imaginary Bahamas-bound jet at Newcastle Airport and then, as a 49-year-old, escalated to weapons of mass destruction.

Dave's urge to build himself a popular persona is altogether more prosaic but there he was last week confessing that, when at Eton: "I was doing things that teenagers do….drinking too much, being caught having the odd fag, things like that."

As the general election gets nearer, prepare yourselves for the cigar he shared with Winston Churchill, his roll-up demonstration from Bob Marley and the inebriated boy stowaway on Apollo 13.

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