Airstrip One

It makes you sick - 6th December 2002, 21.30

The cultural bulimics at the BBC have irrigated colonic depths as yet unreached by brown nosers in this particularly atrocious article, "Big Brains ponder EU architecture". To quote:

Half-way through this week's plenary session of the Convention on the Future of Europe, I noticed that two men appeared to be employed to sit, in turns, on the stage just behind the Convention President, Valery Giscard d'Estaing. His sole purpose, it seems, is to push the president's chair in and out when he decides to get up and stretch his legs. He does that quite often, and comes back each time with his huge ET-like dome of a head bulging with even bigger thoughts. The convention is a place for profound thinking.

Nine months into its work, it is deep into the minutiae of constitution-writing. And make no mistake - the European Union's future is in the hands of some very clever men and women. Rarely a session goes by without a tribute to these "founding fathers". Perhaps some day the cliffs of the Rhine will be carved with Mount Rushmore-like statues of the three key figures - the beefy former Belgian Prime Minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, the silver-haired, arm-waving Italian, Giuliano Amato, and "ET". This week, they have been discussing "simplification of instruments and procedures".

Convention Vice-President Amato pointed out that EU law-making was so complex that people did not understand it. He proposed simplifying things, having only laws and framework laws rather than regulations and directives, as at present, because "what in Brussels is a regulation would be a law anywhere else". The discussion, it should be said - although it is aimed at making the EU more understandable to the common man - itself hovers in a legalistic stratosphere, which would make the common man gawp with admiration, or incomprehension.

"Atypical acts should not be used if typical acts exist," someone was saying, and I noticed that some of the convention grandees - many of the members are past or serving foreign ministers, MPs or PMs - were starting to get up and walk about for a while, apparently to ward off deep-vein thrombosis, or perhaps some even more catastrophic affliction to the brain.

I know how they feel after reading Angus Roxburgh's crap.

Such Europhilia has also been noticed by BBC Bias as well as the blog, biased bbc.