Airstrip One

Taking the message to Russia - 7th December 2002, 13.39

A pallid column on European enlargement by Boris Kagarlitsky invited a forceful response from Paul Cheale, President of the Fresh Meat Wholesalers, 1993-1995, and an abattoir owner battling the Meat Hygiene Scheme. Here it is in full:

Editor,
I find it interesting that your columnist should see the bureaucracy in Brussels as being "irreproachably democratic" when the majority of us in the U.K. see it as anything but. Huge numbers of regulations being forced upon us and our businesses are created by unelected officials and were certainly never subject to due process in the European Parliament. Not that it would have made much difference if they had been. Thousands of laws and regulations are passed year in year out by European MPs block-voting because they could not possibly comprehend or understand them due to their sheer bulk and complexity.

I grant that generally EU dissidents are not beaten down with shovels but they certainly are beaten down. They don't use shovels, they use regulations, red tape and bureaucracy to reduce us to impotency. Legitimate complaints and objections to these regulations that threaten our very livelihood are lost in the political process or just ignored. We are being slowly but surely disenfranchised. Talk of democracy has an increasingly hollow ring.

Lenin, if you could but see us now.

As a businessman in the EU, I can assure you that there is no "Union." The common market does not exist. Take the illegal French ban on British beef as an example of flagrant protectionism or Vodafone's experience of trying to buy into the German market. Our farming industry has been ruined; our fishing industry is vanishing; our manufacturing industry is in decline; and we rely more and more on a service industry base that is being attacked by more red tape and regulation. European politicians talk grandly about enlargement and the European dream while, at the grass-roots level, we see the reality of this protectionism and the biased interpretation of regulations by our European "colleagues" whilst they greedily feed at the Brussels trough. Come the time when those who have been receiving are expected to give -- then we shall see the members' real colors.

Could it be that the milestone of enlargement becomes a millstone around the neck of Europe that will sink it?


Paul Cheale
Cheale Meats Ltd.
Little Warley, Essex