EU MYTHCONCEPTIONS: THE GAME SHOW

Another result of Willy De Clercq’s Svengali-like scheme to “introduce the European dimension into fiction, games and shows”, was that the EU began part-funding the god-awful 1990s daytime TV game-show Going for Gold, presented by the oleaginous Henry Kelly, in which contestants drawn from across Europe competed to answer generalknowledge questions in the studio, thereby fostering a sense of pan-European consensus – the consensus being that the show was a total waste of public money. And yet, one simple change in format would have made the programme watchable. Instead of a general-knowledge quiz, why not a True or False game in which Pierre from Paris and Bertha from Berlin battled to guess the veracity of various of Euro-Myths, in a total rip-off of Mat Coward’s long-running FT ‘Mythconceptions’ column? Play along yourself: can you guess which of these 12 apparent EuroMyths, corresponding to the 12 gold stars of the EU flag, are real and which were simply invented by journalistic clones of Boris?

1. EUROPE GOES NUTS

In 2006, it was reported that the EU planned to force Brits to call bags of ‘Bombay Mix’ ‘Mumbai Mix’, in order to “make the snack politically correct” and avoid offending sensitive anticolonialist nut-fans living on the subcontinent. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: Whilst printed in the

Sun, the story was eventually tracked back to an employee of an obscure British News Agency, which admitted it came from “a mate” who had once “heard it being talked about” at the Home Office, before pleading that “this is just meant to be funny for the tabloids”. Amazingly, this particular story was debunked by the Daily Telegraph.

2. TOY NON-STORY

In 1994, Brussels planned to implement ridiculous rules banning imports of all “nonhuman” toys from China into the EU, meaning that plastic figures of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk would be allowed in but not pointyeared Vulcan Mr Spock, creating interesting debates amongst Customs Officers about whether Noddy and Big-Ears, as possible elves and gnomes, should be allowed free access to the continent or turned back at the ports, as Matteo Salvini would desire. TRUE or FALSE?

TECHNICALLY FALSE: The potential EU quota system for toy imports proposed in 1994 did indeed seek to draw a distinction between human dolls and non-human ones, but this was actually based upon adhering to standard customs regulations drawn up by another global body in 1950, not the EU; Mr Spock would not be denied entry as an undesirable Chinese alien as such. Nonetheless, if the EU had wished to strike such distinctions from their own legal corpus, they could presumably have done so.

3. FISHERS OF MEN

The EU introduced regulations in 1992 forcing all fishing vessels to carry “a minimum” of 200 condoms on-board, apparently just in case fishermen decided to fend off boredom by having a gay orgy on the high seas. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: From 1 Janary 1995, it became compulsory under EU law for all such vessels to carry medical kits in case of an emergency at sea – you could include condoms within it if you liked, I suppose, but it would probably be better to bring along medicine, bandages, defibrillators, TCP and pain-killers. The EU was promoting an anti-AIDS safe-sex campaign at the time, and the two issues were deliberately conflated for satirical purposes.

4. JUST USE A BENT BANANA Under the EU’s 2004 Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Directives, it was made compulsory for embarrassed women to hand back their old vibrators to licensed sex-shop operators for recycling before they would be allowed to buy any new ones. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: Women (or men) were under no legal compulsion to hand over their old sex-toys for recycling; but vendors of such items were obliged to don a pair of protective rubber-gloves and accept them back to be recycled free of charge should any “final owners of such goods” turn up brandishing a motorised dildo at them.

5. EU SMELL!

In 1996, the EU decided to fund research into the smell of workers in different member-states, in order to create a new olfactory measurement called an ‘olf’, which would represent the kind of odour emitted by a “standard European person”. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: Between 1992 and 1995, the UK Building Research Establishment teamed up with the European Commission to perform studies into indoor airpollution in workplaces which did involve the issue of offensive smells, but no attempt was made to define just how badly all foreigners reek of garlic, herrings or cheese.

6. JOURNALISTIC SAUCES

In 2002, a “spectacularly obscure” EU committee met to consider rules which determined that if any savoury sauce contains more than 20% lumps, it must immediately be reclassified as “a vegetable in disguise” and thus become subject to Single Market import and export tariffs of up to 288%. TRUE or FALSE?

TRUE: The Nomenclature SubGroup of the Customs Code Committee did indeed meet in 2002 to decide whether or not to keep this regulation, or to raise the threshold at which sauce magically becomes a vegetable within Europe’s borders to 30%. Sauce manufacturers, eager to avoid such tariffs, and aware many customers liked “texturally interesting” lumpy sauces, hired a lobbying firm to present the EU’s meeting to the Press as another ‘Brussels gone mad!’ tale, hoping to persuade bureaucrats to raise the limit or abolish it altogether under public pressure. An EU spokesman disingenuously tried to discredit the whole story based on one tiny, trivial inaccuracy in a Times editorial, but it was actually all quite true.

7. NOT A CRUST TO SPARE

A 1995 EU Directive stipulated that if you wanted to throw bread to swans, ducks or homeless people, both those giving and those receiving the charitable donation had to buy a special licence costing £2,000; something which is beyond the financial range of most water-fowl, and indeed most mendicants. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: The EU did pass environmental laws governing the responsible disposal of waste, but under the key European principle of subsidiarity it was up to individual EU nations to devise and implement the specifics.

8. WATERLOO SUNSET

To avoid offending the French, in 2003 it was proposed that Britain should rename Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Station with something less Francophobic. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: This was intended as a joke, made by a single individual, not an actual proposal made by the EU.

9. YET MORE CABBAGES

While the Ten Commandments (at least one of which her brother has so singularly failed to obey down the years) are only 79 words in total, said Boris’s sister Rachel Johnson in March 2016, EU regulations on the sale of cabbages run to 26,911 words. TRUE or FALSE?

TECHNICALLY FALSE: Regular readers of MythConceptions will know this is a standard myth about overly verbose governmental regulations everywhere. EU cabbage laws in fact run to ‘only’ 1,800 words… which is still 1,700 words more than God used to summarise an entire moral code on Moses’s easily-ignored tablets.

10. SOILED SHEETS

Under 2014 EU environmental regulations, cows were banned from defecating on hillsides due to the large amount of nitrates

their dung contains, forcing farmers to fit their cattle with giant nappies. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: The EU’s 1991 Nitrates Directive requires member states to regulate the amount of nitrates running off land into water-sources, but the idea that cows must perforce be fitted with giant nappies was invented by an Alan Abellike German farmer who did indeed wrap bedsheets around his animals’ anuses and then call out the Press, but as part of a lobbying campaign against arguably overlyintrusive domestic nitrates regulation devised by the Bavarian Farm Union.

11. BREAST IS BEST

In 2005, the EU declared it was a “health hazard” for barmaids to show too much cleavage, and ordered them to cover up in case they got skincancer. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: The EU regulations in question simply required employers to take into account the risk of skin-cancer to employees who work outside with skin showing all day long, like constructionworkers, and take action accordingly. The reference to barmaids’ breasts was just a deliberately daft tabloid extrapolation.

12. GOING FOR GOLD

In 2019, FT reported that old TV game show Going for Gold was part-funded by the EU as part of a pro-European propaganda campaign. TRUE or FALSE?

FALSE: Going for Gold was not in receipt of any EU cash whatsoever; it was a format invented by Grundy TV in Australia and sold on to BBC1, where it began being broadcast in 1987, five years prior to Willy De Clercq’s report even being published – my very own Euro-Myth. See how easy it is to put these things out there?

Clearly, most Euro-Myths are just that – myths. But not all of them. For example, the EU’s myth-busting website (from which many of the above tales are drawn) contains an entry dated July 1993, clearly created in the aftermath of the stink caused by Boris’s revelations about Willy De Clercq’s call for pan-European manipulation of the media, playing down speculation that “The EC has authorised a 120-episode Euro soapopera, as well as a Euro news channel, with the aim of promoting the European ideal” something which, the site correctly pointed out, was untrue – in narrow terms. Yet the EU, following De Clercq’s scheme, clearly did set out to manipulate the media with the aim of “promoting the European ideal” via other means than a Strasbourg-set version of Coronation Street.

Consider a ridiculous 2014 children’s story-book, aimed at schools and published under the auspices of the European Commission, entitled The Mystery of the Golden Stars: An Adventure in the European Union, which must feature the least appealing backcover blurb ever: “Hello, and welcome to Brussels, capital of Belgium! This book invites you to tour Brussels, discovering what the European Union is, how it works and how it may be relevant to you... Good luck and lots of fun!” The story concerns a group of kids who try to imitate their hero, Belgian boy-detective Tintin, by wandering around his creator Hergé’s homecity and solving the exciting mystery of just what the Treaty of Rome ever did for us. Finding obscure references to the Schuman Declaration and Ted Heath hidden within things like an antique teddy bear, the kids are pursued by an evil woman with a golden claw and “something pitiless about her eyes, like a reptilian predator” before at the end of every chapter they e-mail back home to the class of captive real-life British schoolchildren being forced to read this drivel, asking them to solve a ‘fun’, EU-related puzzle. Chased by the lizard-lady, the kids take temporary refuge within the sheltering hemicycle of the EU Parliament Building, where they exchange thrilling dialogue like this: “Where can I buy a bottle of water? I’m parched,” said Ricki. “Can’t you just get some tap water?” asked Maddy, irritably. “But I was told you can’t drink from the taps on the continent,” replied Ricki. “Wow, you are behind the times,” scolded Maddy. “It’s perfectly safe because of the strict laws they made right here in the European Parliament.” This is a heavy-handed cue for the teacher to explain the precise nature of EU waterfiltration to his or her pupils, even the fascinating factoid that “drinking water quality is reported to the European Commission in three-year cycles.” To appeal to children’s natural interests, they should also be informed of the legal specifics of EU toy-safety standards and the official ‘CE’ safety kite-mark. It is important they know how such landmark EU-inspired legislation as the UK’s Toy (Safety) Regulations Act (1995) represent subsidiary member-state transpositions of original EU-wide directives into the corpus of national law, thus meaning that, when any specific toy is found to be unsafe, all member-states are quickly and efficiently “notified by means of the RAPEX alert system”. Via scrutiny of such wise measures, the Tintin-loving kids manage to uncover clues which, if deciphered correctly, will “lead us to the centre of the EU” – a large roundabout in central Brussels, where they uncover a missing golden crown and are rewarded for their efforts with a celebratory speech from the President of the European Commission. As Boris Johnson’s Daily Mail rival Richard Littlejohn is so fond of saying: “You couldn’t make it up!” And, in this instance, there was no need to.

SOURCES: https://blogs.ec.europa. eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/; https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2016/jun/23/10-best-euromyths-from-custard-creams-tocondoms; http://irepntu.ac.uk/id/ eprint/18880/1/192263_643%20 Cross%20Prepublisher.pdf; https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2002/jan/11/worlddispatch. andrewosborn; https://publications. europa.eu/en/publication/