The legacy of Heath

He took us into "Europe" to give us peace in our time and prosperity. Instead, we got an unelected, technocratic bureaucracy which spends its time devising more and more insane rules, of such increasing complexity that no one can even begin to understand them all.

However, as Booker pointed out in his piece yesterday about the food supplements directive, there is always someone who benefits from them – usually big business, at the expense of small traders and the public.

How appropriate, therefore, that on the same night that Heath died, the Google news service should offer this piece as a news item – a puff for extremely expensive "mains suppression filters", to help you all "implement the protection specified in EU Directive 89/336/EEC (the electromagnetic compatibility directive) as well as machine guideline 98/37/EC" – laws most of you didn't even know existed.

Readers will be pleased to know that the European supplier, Murrelektronik, is making available these MEF mains suppression filters (at a price), to provide (in summary):

...reduced emitted interference and improved immunity from internal and external interference on mains and power-supply cable to enable conformity with Class B interference emission limits defined in EN 55022 and 55011, so offering high energy absorption and wide-band damping behaviour up to 30Hz, designed to suppress the essentially symmetrical interference (differential mode) that occurs in conventional motor drives and between the lines in the low frequency range because of inductivity without interference suppression.

However, the pièce de resistance is the name of the manufacturer. Based at 899 Heidelberg Road, Ivanhoe, 3079 Victoria, Australia, it rejoices under the title Sick Pty Ltd. Rather like the EU, the company claims its products "touch people's lives every day, making their lives easier, protecting from danger and providing them with better service."

Says it all, really.