THE political banter about Britain’s membership of the European Union is increasing as the time for the promised referendum draws nearer. For understandable reasons, much of the arguments at the moment focus upon migration and the economic threats facing those in membership of the EU.

Many readers may therefore have missed some news about recent EU activity that tells of the latest directive to emerge from Brussels. Given all the major issues and problems upon which we might have expected direction, it made my eyebrows shoot up to discover that the directive deals mainly with oven gloves.

It seems that the bureaucrats and politicians wielding the real power within the EU have spotted an issue concerning the safety of oven gloves that has in their opinion justified committing time and resources to producing a new directive.

I can’t help wondering upon what evidence they based that decision. If I had the means to ask GPs, ambulance crews and A & E department staff how many people they treat in a year for burnt hands resulting from poor quality oven gloves, I doubt that they would declare this cause and type of injury to be very common.

As a retired fire officer, I have a good knowledge of the common causes of fire and spontaneous combustion of oven gloves is not high on the list. Despite this, one of the reasons for the production of a directive is to “preclude any risk of spontaneous ignition (of oven gloves) under the foreseeable conditions of use.”

You can be sure that in order to draft such a directive and then to ensure its future approval and implementation throughout the EU, a considerable number of bureaucrats will have been employed for years and committee rooms will have buzzed many times with debate as politicians argued over the fine detail of the wording to go into the document.

Can’t you just visualise those employed to churn out such rubbish returning home after work and being questioned by family members enquiring if they had spent time on the burning issues worrying all of us within the EU only to receive the answer: “Well, I have spent another week working on the safety standard for oven gloves.”

I have family members living in the USA and when I mentioned the new oven gloves directive to them, they burst out laughing. It seemed so bizarre and risible to those outside the EU that time was being wasted on such an apparently trivial matter.

To be fair to the British Government, attempts to block the new directive on kitchen hand protection were made but our MEPs were ignored. The much louder voices of German and French MEPs carried the day. One of the more polite comments I have seen about this waste of time and money is that the production of the directive was “over-zealous”. But the description I warm to is “bonkers” and that seems to fit the circumstances much more accurately.

The vast undemocratic and unaccountable EU political entity that does more to rule our lives than Westminster has spent its time and our money producing a solution to a problem that didn’t exist in the first place!

What is beyond doubt is that the new directive will add 20 per cent to the price of the oven gloves we shall all be buying.

Surely, this idiotic piece of legislation is a gift to those campaigning for us to leave the EU. It is a prime example of the lack of common sense and good judgement that damages the image of the EU.