EU plan to
trash British
road signs

This isn't the first time this issue has come up, but technological advances have given it new teeth.

The story is that the EU (read: the ongoing Franco-Germanic conspiracy) is looking to standardise road signs across Europe in an effort to "cut road deaths".

There's new thinking on the march called EuroRAP which translates as: European Road Assessment Programme. Under this paradigm, a new generation of intelligent cars will be able to "read" instructions from road signs and convert those instructions into orders that our good German (and French) cars will dutifully obey and will do whatever is necessary to prevent a collision. As a result, standardisation is (allegedly) required.

Why all the signs have to look the same isn't clear. It seems to us that there are thousands of mobile phone designs in the world, and they all manage to communicate with each other. That aside, the European Commission is nevertheless looking into this plan. But mercifully, not everything that goes before them comes to fruition.

And it seems that under these proposals, the width of road marking lines will also have to be standardised (or is this just another EU banana-shape scare story?)

Meanwhile, Tory MPs and UK local authorities are forming a queue of objectors anxious to remind the Euronazis that there's no cash in the kitty, and that we don't much want this kind of homogenisation, anyway. We like our quaint Anglo Saxon triangles and 1950s graphics, and we like to see French signs in France and German signs in Germany.

No doubt the UK's Labour councils will see it differently and will be only too happy to dig a little deeper into your pockets and scoop out the last of the fluff. But you might want to keep an eye on this one and make your objections heard if and when you get the opportunity.

Around here we genuinely love the Germans. How else would we have won the last two world wars without them? But we're sick to death of the Euronazis and are ready to light the fuse on the next international conflict if we can just get a match to burn in the winds of (over-rapid) change howling in from the east.

When they start erecting signs reading "We're coming out of Europe", we'll be happy to pull over at the side of the road and salute those. In the meantime, we're saying nein and non to these new signs of the times.

— Big End

Copyright Sump Publishing 2013