News from
David Sumberg MEP
Summer
2003
Conservative Member of the European Parliament for the North West of England
LETTER FROM EUROPE
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM
The UK government has recently announced that taking too many vitamin supplements can actually be bad for us. This verdict follows a recent EU directive that proposes to harmonise the laws across all EU member states regarding the sale of permissible vitamin supplements. Currently there are fifteen sets of national rules and a common standard seemed a good idea. The problem is that on the continent, such products are generally banned unless they are specifically permitted whilst in the UK they are generally permitted unless they are specifically banned.
Under the proposed EU laws, some three hundred vitamin supplements currently legally sold in the UK will each have to undergo a rigorous new testing programme in order to be permitted – a process which would be too costly for many existing small manufacturers. Some of us in the Parliament fought to keep the freedom of choice we are used to in the UK but we couldn’t drum up sufficient support from other countries.
A certain Doctor Rath decided to mount a highly original lobbying campaign. He was anxious to promote his controversial cancer treatment that relied on heavy doses of basic vitamins. He launched his own website and encouraged all comers to email every single MEP with a variety of standard messages essentially calling for a Europe-wide referendum on the issue of the freedom of consumer choice to buy vitamins.
For several days running I personally had over a thousand emails between midnight and breakfast as some persistent emailers kept sending and resending the same message. Finally, the whole European Parliamentary email system jammed up as a result of four million emails hitting it. To use the new jargon word, we had all been spammed.
In my day as a youngster the word ‘spam’ stood for Special Ham, a composite cheap and cheerful meat product. Nowdays it stands for junk email and has even become a word in its own right. The same word has been adopted into most EU languages. Exceptions are Finnish, with the word Roskaposti, and Swedish with Skrappost.
Spamming has now become an epidemic. In the USA alone last year, there were over three hundred billion junk emails, double the level of the year before. 70% of this comes from just two hundred organisations. For them it is a big business. For those of us on the receiving end, it is a big pain.
I am still in favour of freedom of consumer choice regarding the purchase of vitamins. But I am definitely even more in favour of restricting the freedom of organisations to send spam. I now dislike all kinds of spam, with or without added vitamins.
EUROPE’S BARMY ARMY
Four EU countries, France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, have recently been meeting in Brussels to make yet more plans for an EU army. Of course we have had a whole sequence of plans – Blair’s Anglo-French St Malo initiative, the EU Rapid Reaction force, the NATO Rapid Reaction Force and now the Luxembourg Force de Frappe.
The attempts to set up an EU army are characterised by plans, reports, strategies, command structures, general staffs, offices, bureaucracies – everything you need for an effective fighting force except soldiers, guns, tanks, aircraft, ships and money. And of course, the British Armed Forces, overstretched as they are, remain the most credible and effective forces in Europe.
The main thing this latest meeting has achieved is to set in stone the divide between the “Old Europe” of France and Germany, and the New Europe of Britain, Spain, Italy, plus – importantly – many of the new accession states, who recognise the critical importance of the transatlantic alliance.
If we have finally recognised our real strategic priorities, if we have given up the vain search for a fuzzy European defence consensus that does not and cannot exist, that can only be a good thing. We can hold a celebratory wake for the demise of the EU’s Common Foreign and Defence Policy.
FERRETS SANS FRONTIERES
Ferrets may be free to roam Europe after MEPs recently approved legislation to issue them with pet passports. In a year’s time, Britain’s estimated two million ferrets get the same right as Britain’s dogs and cats – if they have a rabies jab. Other beneficiaries are mice, rats, chinchillas, rabbits and guineapigs.
These were excluded from pet legislation because there was no test to show vaccination has made an animal rabies-free. But vets have concluded the risk is too small to justify the restriction. The ‘passport’ is a microchip under the skin registering the jab; the alternative is six months quarantine.
I suppose this is very good news for ferrets but I am somewhat relieved that no constituent has yet contacted me with a request that I take their pet ferret over to Europe with me on my journey to work in the Parliament!