How the 21st Century will be remembered.

(Photo: Alamy)

In early June my Son-in-law-who-cooks brought my attention to the fact that Brussels bureaucrats had banned drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration.

The following article by Ed West - a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture – just about sums it all up -

How will history students of the future – assuming anyone in England studies history, which is not a given – remember our era? How will they caricature us in the way that we caricature Victorians as being sexually uptight, or those before them as port-sodden rakes and gin-soaked paupers?

Considering the way we look at the pre-Reformation Age, with its theology-dominated academia and its lethal wars waged over what seems today like the most unimaginably pointless of reasons, I imagine it will be the bureaucracy that people recall.

The European Union, in particular, will not be remembered for its philosophical flaws, nor its anti-democratic methods, nor the economic weakness of a currency launched with all the hubris of the Titanic, but the mind-numbing tedium of its bureaucratic machinery. I would say that this will be remembered long after its leaders are forgotten, but most of the EU’s leaders are forgotten even in office (in the 21st century the faces of the people who rule us are probably less familiar to the average person than Ethelred II was to his subjects).

This is already how the EU is viewed, with many people more familiar with its rulings on banana shapes and weights and measures than with its more serious faults.

The Telegraph 6^th June 2012