Euro-controls
Sir: I find myself wondering from time to time how particular actions of EEC bureaucrats and politicians are supposed to further the Community's principal aims. One such occasion arose from the propos- als of Mr Carlo Ripa de Meana to attempt to amend the Government's Water Bill on the grounds that the purity standards and provisions for enforcing them did not comply with EEC requirements.
How does he, or any other Euro-official, seriously justify intervention in a matter concerning a service which is exclusively for national consumption, with no prospect of export to other member countries or elsewhere? We have begun to accept exter- nal regulation over exportable products as the price of membership, but are we not now seeing the price rising steeply, while the benefits remain much as before?
It seemed at the time of the referendum in 1975 that the opportunity was largely one of joining a market, the purpose of whose central regulation was to ensure free and fair trade. Since that date the head- hunters appear to have recruited officials whose aim is not to run a market, but an administrative region of consistent and all-embracing regulation.
Oliver A. W. Lodge
30 Leathwaite Road, London SW11
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