Here are some stupid EU impositions which annoy me personally. The list is personal, not comprehensive, probably not the worst cases by any means, not in any particular order.
* They’ve mandated a power reduction in vacuum cleaners. They thing this saves electricity. What it does do, is cause one to spend twice as long on the same cleaning. And possibly, use more electricity in the process.
* The tampon tax. The UK government wants to reduce VAT on tampons and other female sanitary products to zero. It’s a tax that should never have existed. But the EU won’t let us reduce it below 5%. PS I’m a man!
* VAT on Electricity, gas and heating oil. Ditto, although I’m not so sure that the UK government actually wants to remove this tax.
* Red passports. Surely none of their business what colour a UK passport is? Oh, but the hidden agenda: the UK is just a province of the EU, and EU passports must be red.
* HS2. Yes, it’s a UK government folly that they want to build it, but it’s an EU diktat that says it must be an ultra-high-speed line. It would be far more useful and far cheaper were it just an ordinary 100mph express line to add capacity to the UK rail network, with more stations and local services. Or spend the money on making the existing lines and stations take double-decker trains. Look at Switzerland. Their railways are as near perfect as any I’ve experienced. The one thing they don’t do, is 180mph trains. The Great Central Main Line - Wikipedia, closed by the Beeching report, could be reopened as a 120–130MPH line!
* Corruption. the EU budget has not been signed off by its auditors for twenty years. Also EU top brass salaries and expenses. Private jets hired for 200 mile journeys within Europe, and lots of suchlike. It’s not exactly corruption, because it’s within the rules! They are trying to keep it secret. We are paying for this, as one of the net-contributor countries.
* Ban on recycled jam-jars. We used to keep jars we bought in the shops filled with jam or marmalade, wash them, sterilize them in the oven, fill them with home-made jam, and give the surplus to church fetes and suchlike. It’s now illegal for a church fete to sell jam that’s not been poured into a brand-new jam-jar.
* The EU patent office. I’d need a couple of pages to explain, so Google if you need more. Corrupt and incompetent and working to the detriment of 99% of businesses (and to the benefit of large non-EU businesses).
* The common fisheries policy. It mandated that if fish of the wrong species were caught accidentally, the dead fish had to be thrown overboard, and the fishermen carried on killing more fish, until they reached the “right” quotas of the “right” species.
* Real cheese. Several cheeses formerly made with unpasteurized milk have been banned, supposedly on safety grounds, or rendered unprofitable by impossibly tough regulation. The big commercial cheesemakers making bland imitations out of pasteurized milk are presumably behind the regulations.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of- ... -in-the-UK
(Edited to remove pending and dubious cases)