From today’s Torygraph a story of the joys that the European Union brings us. As part of the drive to protect us, the drive to regulate every jot and tittle of activity on the continent, our bureaucratic masters have issued regulations about how medical trials are to be undertaken. Of course, the pimple-nosed pinheads who design such paperwork believe that the only people who do trials on new drugs and new treatments are the large drug companies. They have no knowledge of the fact that much research is done by small teams of academics, or by charities, or even purely voluntarily. The net result? Most drug research in Europe has closed down.

Researchers fear that the EU’s Clinical Trials Directive will impose a heavy burden of extra costs, complexity and paperwork on universities and hospitals carrying out low-budget studies of medical products.
The law was agreed in 2001 to harmonise EU standards, even though the existing code of conduct worked well. The directive, which came into force in Britain in May, has led to a Europe-wide freeze on a range of future trials planned by research groups, or caused a flight to more hospitable locations outside the EU.
Prof Richard Gray, the head of Birmingham Clinical Trials Unit, called the directive bureaucracy run mad.
“We have not undertaken any new projects for a year because of this,” he said. “It’s the most complete nonsense. Everybody is running around like headless chickens trying to work out how to cope.”
The worst affected would be the mass trials that often lead to a breakthrough in the hunt for cheap and easy treatments. These can involve as many as 70,000 people taking no more than a daily dose of aspirin, and rely entirely on goodwill and the volunteer spirit.
The law was intended for big drug firms which conduct high-cost trials with small numbers of people. It was made more draconian by Euro-MPs and ministers hoping to protect patients from abuse.
Dr Richard Sullivan, the head of Cancer Research UK, said it would raise the cost of academic and non-commercial studies by up to four times. “The idiots who designed this had no understanding of the vast amount of other research going on,” he said. “It’s not going to make the slightest difference to the big firms but it’s awful for the little guys.”
Dr Brian Moulton, the head of Save European Research, said the law should be scrapped immediately. “Common sense will have to prevail somehow because you can’t just let European research close down overnight – can you?” he said.

Common sense dear Doctor? What are you talking about? These are the people who made selling a curvy banana a criminal offense worthy of three months pokey, the people who are closing down the European chemicals industry with the REACH Directive (one effect of which looks likely to be making it illegal to refine oil or make jet engines within the EU), the people whose edicts on recycling mean ever less recycling, in short, they are bureaucrats. The reaction from the newly asbestos free Berlaymont (would that we had simply left them and the asbestos together. Paying out disability benefit for a few thousand cases of mesothelioma would have been cheaper than the damage these morons are doing to us) ?

Privately, EU officials admit the directive was badly mishandled. They are preparing “flexible” guidelines that in effect urge governments to violate the law they have just introduced. British authorities are also searching for ways to soften the legislation.

Hey, morons. When you screw up the way to deal with it is to say “Ooops, we screwed up” and then go on to abolish the law that led to the screw up. But nooo, we can’t have that can we? That would mean an admission that the Eurocracy is not in fact infallible, (even the Pope only claims infallibility for the claim that he is infallible) and the damage that such a shocking revelation would do to the European Project is so high that it just cannot be allowed. Far better to stop medical research, far better to allow more of the proles and hoi polloi to die, far better to shuffle paper in search of a “solution” than to strike at the very heart of the faith that all of us gormless peasants have in our wise and munificent rulers.
It is stories and actions like this that remind me why the EU (and other such meddlesome bureaucracies as the Council of Europe etc, all places where unelected fatuities get to gorge, swill and exercise their mistress allowances far away from the watchful eyes of the electorate, removed from any democratic oversight) is so adamantly opposed to the death penalty. They are worried that one day we will wake up, the guillotine will be set up in the public square again and the tumbrils will come for them.
Upon which day I shall sit beneath the platform, happily knitting the cloth out of which we shall clothe our newfound, currently mislaid, freedom.