My two bob’s worth:

1. The environment is more important than personal choice in a way… damaging the environment will imit our personal choice, and that of the people who replace us.

2. Leaving environmental matters to the marketplace (the theory that people will do what’s in their own best long-term interests) is a bit like leaving finance risk and health to the financial sector, or reducing dependence on oils through vehicle efficiency with vehicle manufacturers.

DaveBG is right about constitution and regulation of EU.

‘EU law’ is British law.

EU law is incorporated into British law, having been formulated by the various Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and their appointed representatives in the various EU bodies and the directly elected MEPs (like the Council of Ministers, the Commission and the EU Parliament).

The idea that the sovereign states that comprise the EU are disconnected from the EU and just periodically handed down this law without any input, or consultation is just to completely fail to understand how it works.

The EU is run by the sovereign states.
Wh do you think formulates the law and comes up with the ideas for policy?

It’s the various Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and their appointed representatives in the various EU bodies along with the directly elected Members of the European Parliament.

(and in fact the reason why the EU Parliament is kept relatively powerless is to ensure that it is the sovereign member states that wield the most power and that the EU itself cannot become the ‘superstate’ it’s right-wing critics dream it will become – which the recent French and Dutch referendums proved can never happen anyways, the people will not allow it)

It’s actually rubbish, besides a relative handful of very light-sensitive people almost everyone else has been enjoying lower electricity bills and barely noticed the ‘ban’.

As for Plasma?

Well I bought a little while back and long-term electricity savings were part of my calculation.
I bought LCD.
Perhaps it wasn’t as good (by a mere couple of %…..and whatever gap there was is now closing fast as LCDs improve every year) compared to a Plasma set but so what?
Most of the time it’s just a TV set and for what I lose in movies I make up for in my wallet.

The idea that saving money, energy and making the maximum out of our natural resources is somehow ‘fascist’ or ‘Police state’ is frankly laughable and about as juvenile as it gets.

It’s good to see the USA is now moving away from that kind of ignorant stupidity too now.

stop sucking up to your american audience by talking about Freedom, you always do this,(americans are obsessed with thinking the rest of the world isnt free, thanks to propaganda crap in their country,) it’s a crock of s**T, and your simply feeding them by writing and over exaggerating this rubbish, your just as free as anybody else, and yes america has CCTV all over its CBD’s.

Just listen to the crap Ken wrote “herd mentality”

Which it doesn’t. Europe is far more regulated and herd mentality. You don’t see our major cities with cameras recording public places like London. National ID cards and pushing net traffic through a mothership database. How civilized.

Euro-Bush Derangement Syndrome is even more unbalanced than what we have over here.