THE EU was ridiculed last night after it took three years to issue a new rule that water cannot be sold as healthy.In a scarcely believable Âruling, a panel of experts threw out a claim that regular water consumption is the best way to rehydrate the body.
The bizarre diktat from Brussels has far-reaching implications for member states, including Britain, as no water sold in the EU can now claim to protect against dehydration.
What's bizarre about a diktat from Brussels? They live for this stuff...
Any producer breaching the order, signed by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, faces being jailed for up to two years. It took the 21 scientists on the panel three years of analysis into the link between water and dehydration to come to their extraordinary conclusion.
Last night the decision of the European Food Safety Authority's panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies was labelled "beyond parody". Ukip's deputy leader Paul Nuttall, who sits on the European Parliament's Public Health Committee, said: "I had to read this four or five times before I believed it.
"It is a perfect example of what the EU does best and makes the bendy banana law look positively sane."
Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: "The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are, highly paid, highly pensioned officials trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.
The EU has a long history of passing bizarre regulations, the most infamous being 1995 rules setting out dimensions for fruit and vegetables which led to excessively curved bananas and ugly carrots being banned. And last year attempts to regulate the use of root vegetables in Cornish pasties sparked chaos.