A little story of how blogs are influencing the political world (well, we can hope can’t we?).
The ever fragrant Margot Wallstrom, Vice President of the European Union, has had a blog for the past couple of weeks. In line with my policy of snarling at anything EU related I have been commenting there, hoping that she actually reads such things and so some good sense might be beaten into her (in an intellectual manner, of course. I am not suggesting some sort of S&M relationship with an MILF).

She seems to attract two types of commenters, varied encomiums along the lines of how nice it is for such an exalted personage to actually, er, listen to the general public and the more abusive heckling from the likes  of EU Serf, Richard North and myself. One example would be this post, where Margot drops a few lines about the REACH Directive and also the Lisbon Agenda. I snarl at her with an example from my professional life (in part):

Expand this across all of the companies working on new products (this
is, amazing as it may seem to some, what innovation means) across a
continent of 450 million people and you can see that the costs are
going to be vastly higher than whatever number has so far been plucked
out of the air. For what no one seems to have heeded was the advice of
Frederic Bastiat (yes, despite my disgust with the EU there have indeed
been occasional Frenchmen worthy of remembrance) to always look for
what is hidden. The cost of the testing of new chemicals and
formulations, combinations of them, is what has been added up. What has
not been even noticed is the costs of all the new formulations that
will not be made, as the costs of testing them are vastly greater than
the resources available to do so.

Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam.

(That Latin tag line is an adaptation of Cato’s thoughts on Carthage…"And therefore I conclude that the European Union must be destroyed" and there is a whole section of this blog devoted to that idea, including a number of graphics for you to use, like this one from Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom.)

No, no response from Ms. Walstrom as yet (in her previous job at the Commission it was she who drew up the rules for the aforesaid REACH Directive) but Richard North picked up on the comments, and passed them on to Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph (his long-time collaborator on certain projects….order their revised book, The Great Deception, now!). This led to a phone interview on Wednesday evening and then his column today:

A second, even more damaging EC proposal is the
notorious Reach directive (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation
of Chemicals), under which hundreds of thousands of chemical
formulations will have to be tested and authorised, at astronomic
expense.

I spoke last week to Tim Worstall, an
Englishman living in Portugal who, with partners in Russia and America,
runs a business testing and developing the miraculous properties in
alloys of scandium, a very light, rare metal. A recent order for
Airbus, for 2,000kg of a scandium/aluminium mix worth £40,000, might,
under Reach, cost an additional £50,000 to test and authorise.

For
future models of Airbus, the company is experimenting with
scandium-assisted welding which could reduce the weight of an aircraft
by 10 per cent. Yet for welding rods alone the regulatory costs of the
different formulations could be £3 million.

Like
countless other manufacturers, Mr Worstall concludes that the only
consequence of Reach in its present form will be to drive business
worth billions of pounds outside the EU. Is this what Mr Barroso really
wants?

(You will note slight differences between Richard’s quotations and mine. He is working from the uncorrected proof, I from the corrected published article.)

Now I certainly do not claim that this is going to make a large difference to the new Directive, nor much of one to the way the Commission runs itself. But it is, in a small way, evidence of how blogging in general is bringing matters to wider attention, the very beginnings here in Europe of what happened over the past year or so in the US. I suppose there are two ways that one can look at this. Citizen journalists doing their job of speaking truth to power might be a little overblown….perhaps the peasants revolting again is closer to the reality.