An England victory, hot sunny weather. The perfect ingredients to deaden the blows from this week's Emergency Budget? Not quite.

What we also need is one of those mad pieces of EU legislation, on a par with the ban on bendy cucumbers, and the attack on imperial measures such as pounds and ounces, to distract the nation from the matter at hand.

And luckily the bonkers bureaucrats have not disappointed, as we report here.

The nub of the story is this: the EU wants to outlaw the sale of goods as measured by units, insisting that all goods are sold by weight only, instead. Four hot-cross buns. A dozen eggs. 24 Weetabix. 12 fish fingers. All these descriptors, and more, are set to become illegal under the draft legislation, potentially, to be replaced by catchy phrases like '167g of baps'.

You couldn't make it up, could you? And it would be funny if it were an April Fool's joke. But it's not, and it will potentially cost the industry millions, waste huge amounts of time, while also confusing customers no end.

How has this been allowed to happen? It's apparently an "oversight" in the EU Food Labelling Regulations Act, the same piece of legislation in the headlines last week after it rejected the Food Standards Agency's traffic-light labelling system.

A ban on units isn't the only mad proposal. As we explain on p14, country-of-origin labelling on meat, poultry and fish will be applied even to processed foods, which are often sourced from different countries according to season, availability or price.

It's also hugely disappointing to see the EU continue the mad attempt to tackle obesity using nutrient profiling models based on utterly random 100g measures.

The scary thing is this legislation was the EU's attempt to simplify and rationalise labelling systems. Instead it's created a monster, with several unattractive heads. The Daily Mail is going to have a field day.

Read more
Unit sales to be axed by mad new EU law (26 June 2010)