We’ll be importing paper boys from Lithuania next ...

WhILE call Me Dave steps up his dishonest, intelligence-insulting charade of pretending to renegotiate Britain’s membership of the European Union, back in the real world the madness gathers pace inexorably.

The latest target of the meddling eurocrats is the good old British paper boy. Brussels has just announced that allowing children to deliver newspapers before school is a violation of their fundamental rights.

It is a breach of the European Social charter and could harm their education because it affects their ‘attendance, receptiveness and homework’. Furthermore, the EU wants to limit the ability of children to work during school holidays, claiming it puts their ‘health, moral welfare and development’ at risk.

Where do they find these people? It’s none of their damn business if British children want to earn some pocket money by delivering morning newspapers or working in a coffee bar at half-term. That should be a matter for their parents and, if there are to be regulations governing the hours children should work, for elected British politicians — not faceless, unelected foreign commissars.

As it happens, the eurocrats couldn’t be more wrong about the alleged detrimental impact of youngsters taking part-time jobs. Far from undermining ‘ health, moral welfare and development’, it has the diametric opposite effect. Show me a kid who has done a paper round or a Saturday job in a coffee bar and I’ll show you a model citizen in the making.

you won’t find many of them growing up into the kind of adult happy to lie in bed all day, claiming benefits, while the rest of the world goes out to earn an honest living.

What could be healthier than turning out every morning to deliver papers, feeling the fresh breeze in your face? I speak from experience.

My FIrST step on the career path which led to this column was getting a paper round at the age of 11. cycling at least five miles every day to houses in outlying villages and on new estates, I’ve probably never been healthier.

It not only taught me the discipline of having to report for work, on time, but also the satisfaction of earning my own money. OK, so I may have spent most of my wages on sweets, cigarettes and comics in the newsagent’s shop I was working for, but that’s not the point.

If I was late for school, it was only because I spent more time reading the papers than it should have taken to deliver them.

Many’s the time an irate customer looked out of his window to see me sitting on the front wall scouring the sports pages of his Daily Wossname.

When I was a young teenager, living in Peterborough, pretty much every kid I knew had some kind of job — milk round, grocery round, Saturday girl at the hair salon.

In the summer, I worked as a temporary car park attendant at the local agricultural showground, or distributed leaflets to earn a few quid. Some of my friends went fruit-picking in the Fens, although that source of employment has long since been snaffled by Eastern European immigrants — another triumph for the EU.

No wonder East Anglian towns such as Boston and Wisbech are now officially the most segregated in the country.

Soon, if Brussels has it way, we’ll be importing paper boys from Lithuania and Latvia, too.

This may seem like small beer to Dave and the ‘deal at any price’ brigade, but it gets to the heart of what’s wrong with Britain’s disastrous European adventure.

While the politicians squabble about the semantics of ‘ever closer union’, the reality is that we are no longer the masters of our own destiny. What should be purely domestic matters, such as whether kids are able to become paper boys, are dictated by the EU. The tentacles of Brussels interfere in virtually every single aspect of our everyday lives.

REcENTLy, I drew your attention to the absurd ban on inshore bass sports angling around our coast — while foreign trawlers are permitted to carry on depleting stocks by the tonne.

Why should the EU decide how many fish we are allowed to catch on Britain’s beaches?

The same goes for business regulation, which is suffocating small companies. While multinationals are content to go along with Brussels directives for the sake of the single market, 95 per cent of businesses in Britain have no dealings with Europe.

yet they are all still expected to comply with every costly cough and spit of EU legislation.

The self-serving political class may be desperate not to be excluded from the lobster supper circuit or lose ‘influence’, but the rest of us have to put up with the unnecessary excesses of perverse European lawmakers daily extending their powers. The ‘ common Market’ we thought we were joining 40- odd years ago has morphed into an anti-democratic behemoth dedicated to wiping out all vestiges of national sovereignty.

As the Tory MP Peter Bone has noted: ‘The founders of the council of Europe did not have in mind paper rounds when talking about human rights.’

They do now. But Dave’s not even attempting to repatriate any of the powers successive governments have so carelessly given away.

And if that’s not a good reason to vote ‘Leave’ I don’t what is.