Another result ofWilly 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 TVgame-showGoingfor
Gold, presented by the oleaginous
HenryKelly, in which contestants
drawn from across Europe
competed to answer general-
knowledge questions in the
studio, thereby fostering a sense
of pan-European consensus–
the consensus being that the
showwas a totalwaste of public
money. Andyet, one simple
change in format would have
made the programmewatchable.
Instead of a general-knowledge
quiz, why not aTrue or False
game in which Pierre fromParis
and Bertha from Berlin battled
to guess thevera city ofvarious
of Euro-Myths, in a total rip-off
of Mat Coward’s long-runningFT
‘Mythconceptions’ column? Play
alongyourself: canyou guess
which of these 12 apparent Euro-
Myths, corresponding to the 12
gold stars of the EU flag, are real
and which were simply invented
by journalistic clones of Boris?- EUROPE GOES NUTS
In 2006, itwas 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 anti-
colonialist nut-fans living on the
subcontinent.TRUEorFALSE?
FALSE:Whilst printed in the
Sun, the storywas eventually
tracked back to an employee of
an obscure British NewsAgency,
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 storywas debunked by
theDailyTelegraph.- TOY NON-STORY
In 1994, Brussels planned to
implement ridiculous rules
banning imports of all“non-
human” toys from China into the
EU, meaning that plastic figures
ofStarTrek’s Captain Kirk would
be allowed in but not pointy-
eared 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.TRUEorFALSE?TECHNICALLYFALSE:The
potential EU quotasystem for toy
imports proposed in 1994 did
indeed seek to draw a distinction
between human dolls and
non-human ones, but thiswas
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.- FISHERS OF MEN
The EU introduced regulations in
1992 forcing all fishingvessels
to carry“a minimum” of 200
condoms on-board, apparently
just in case fishermen decided
to fend off boredom by havinga
gay orgy on the high seas.TRUE
orFALSE?
FALSE:From 1 Janary 1995,
it became compulsory under
EU law for all suchvessels to
carry medical kits in case of an
emergency at sea –you could
include condoms within it ifyou
liked, I suppose, but it would
probably be better to bring
along medicine, bandages,
defibrillators, TCP and
pain-killers. The EUwas
promoting an anti-AIDS
safe-sex campaign at
the time, and the two
issues were deliberately
conflated for satirical
purposes.- JUST USE A BENTBANANA
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.
TRUEorFALSE?
FALSE:Women (or men) were
under no legal compulsion tohand over their old sex-toys for
recycling; butvendors 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.- 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”.TRUEor
FALSE?
FALSE:Between 1992 and
1995, the UK BuildingResearch
Establishment teamed up with
the European Commission to
perform studies into indoor air-
pollution in workplaces which
did involve the issue of offensive
smells, but no attemptwas
made to define just how badly all
foreigners reek ofgarlic, herrings
or cheese.- 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 andexport
tariffs of up to 288%.TRUE
orFALSE?
TRUE:The Nomenclature Sub-
Group of the Customs Code
Committee did indeed meet in
2002 to decide whether or
not tokeep 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, andaware
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 toraise
the limit or abolish it altogether
under public pressure. An EU
spokesman disingenuously triedto discredit the whole story based
on one tiny, trivial inaccuracy ina
Timeseditorial, but itwas actually
all quite true.- NOT A CRUST TO SPARE
A 1995 EU Directive stipulated
that ifyou wanted to throw
bread toswans, ducks or
homeless people, both those
givingandthosereceivingthe
charitable donation had to buya
special licence costing £2,000;
something which is beyond the
financialrange of mostwater-fowl,
and indeed most mendicants.
TRUEorFALSE?
FALSE:The EU did pass
environmental laws governing the
responsible disposal ofwaste,
but under thekey European
principle of subsidiarity itwas up
to individual EU nations to devise
and implement the specifics.- WATERLOO SUNSET
To avoid offending the French,
in 2003 itwas proposed that
Britain should renameTrafalgar
Square andWaterloo Station with
something less Francophobic.
TRUEorFALSE?
FALSE:This was intended asa
joke, made by a single individual,
not an actual proposal made by
the EU.- YET MORE CABBAGES
While theTen Commandments
(at least one of which her brother
has so singularly failed to obey
down theyears) 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.
TRUEorFALSE?
TECHNICALLYFALSE:Regular
readers of MythConceptions
will know this is a standard
myth about overlyverbose
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.- SOILED SHEETS
Under 2014 EU environmental
regulations, cows were banned
from defecating on hillsides due
to the large amount of nitrates
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STRANGE STATESMEN #32EU MYTHCONCEPTIONS: THE GAME SHOW