Norwegians must wonder what madness has seized us
You might think that, what with everything that’s going on in Spain and Greece, Eurocrats had plenty on their plates. You’d be wrong. The EU’s cupidity is unsleeping, for all that its recent initiatives have been driven from our news pages by the travails of the eurozone.
You almost certainly haven’t read anything about the latest power grab – although, if you are British, it should alarm you. Brussels wants to regulate offshore oil and gas drilling. British energy companies and trade unions are united in their fury, pointing out that the European Commission is openly seeking ‘the Europeanisation of energy powers’. Since Britain is overwhelmingly the EU’s largest offshore energy producer – until six years ago, we were the EU’s only net energy exporter – the industry frets that the loss of UK supervision would shift regulatory control into unfriendly hands.
