Regular readers will recall that the last time I blogged about confectionery it was with good news, that the State and the taxman had shoved off and left chocolate teacakes alone, though not before a long fight. It's saddening, therefore, to see in today's Irish Times that the ratchet of big State involvement in every imaginable nook and cranny of people's lives is working again. Those things that national Governments have yet to invade of their own accord, it seems, are increasingly being trampled by the EU instead.
Whilst British Government certainly qualifies as big, invasive, over-regulating, cumbersome, costly and inefficient in its behaviour, this is a stark reminder that it still has a way to go to catch up with the EU. With their tens of thousands of bureaucrats in Brussels slaving over hot keyboards, in their wisdom and zeal they've regulated the highly dangerous extreme sport of...baking competitions at fairs and fetes. That's right, they've banned anyone from consuming the cakes except for the mouthful the judges have to consume in order to assess the baked goods.
After the initial assessment sample has been consumed the cakes must be destroyed, not eaten.
What exactly is the point of this regulation? Why must innofensive events be regulated at all? Worse, why did countless bureaucrats and Commission legislators even bother to draw this law up in the first place - and make us pay them for their trouble?
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