Tom Utley on Europe:

Ad Hellemons, the president of Tispol, the European traffic police network, put it like this: “We can’t understand why governments would want to protect drink-drivers.”
That seems to me to be a very European way of seeing things. Mr Hellemons speaks with the authentic voice of a continent well used to being overrun by dictators – from Napoleon to Hitler and Stalin – and well used to looking on the state and its agents as the masters of the people. In Britain, we have been much luckier. We have a tradition of freedom that most continental Europeans simply don’t understand. The question for us is not: “Why would governments want to protect drink-drivers?” The question that any free-born Briton should ask is: “Why would governments want to subject sober drivers to roadside breath tests, without any reasonable excuse?”
But there is an even more important question that we should be asking: “What has any of this got to do with the EU?” Britain’s arrangements for dealing with drunken drivers, on British soil, are surely a matter for us alone.
I felt the same way when I read that a new European directive was about to come into force, governing the way in which railway timetables are issued throughout the EU. From now on, the system by which British train companies produce two timetables a year – one for the summer and one for the winter – is to be banned.
The EU insists that there should be only one annual timetable, and that it should be published in December. If I have interpreted the rules correctly, British companies will still be allowed to put on extra services in the summer, but, from now on, these must be advertised in the once-a-year timetable, months before they become available. It is all quite incredibly stupid and complicated.
I can understand how these new arrangements may simplify train travel on the European mainland. Not only are there fewer seasonal variations in demand for train services on the Continent, where the weather is more consistent, but you can board a train in any of the capitals of continental Europe that will take you through six or seven different countries.
A part of the romance of train travel in Europe is to look at a single departures board, advertising services to Milan, Berlin, Moscow and Madrid. But in Britain, we have only one international train service. Why should a passenger wanting to travel from Chelmsford to Ipswich have to struggle with an over-complicated timetable, introduced under a rule designed for the convenience of travellers from Naples to Ostend?
It is time that the EU woke up to the fact that Britain is an island, with its own needs and traditions. If Britons are turning increasingly towards the UKIP, the European Commission has only itself to blame.

One might also note that the UK has the lowest level in Europe for deaths on the roads and one of the lowest levels of drunk driving. On the basis of actual results it would seem that the British system should be exprted to the Continent: but of course the EU never works that way now does it?