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		Letter to the Editor Lincolnshire Echo - Tuesday, 6 January 2004 Dear Sir, Lib-Dem MEP Bill Newton Dunn keeps wriggling on Straight Bananas (article, 29 Dec). He says there never was an EU law that requires bananas to be straight. He is playing with words. Commission Regulation EC No. 2257/94 prescribes the maximum permitted curvature of bananas. It is commonly described by headline-writers as the Straight Bananas Directive, and its existence is beyond dispute. He then says "Nor is there any EU law which restricts the height of rocking-horses". But no one ever said there was! What has been reported, quite correctly, was a THREAT of such a law. There is a European Standards Committee, CEN, which offers recommendations to the EU Commission, and was considering the rocking horses proposal. I and other colleagues made representations to the British Standards Institute (BSI), which sits on CEN, and the BSI agreed to oppose the maximum height idea. Last month at a meeting in Brussels, CEN decided to recommend the Commission not to introduce the rule. That's the good news, but we still await confirmation that the Commission will accept CEN's recommendation. Meantime around sixty UK rocking-horse makers, some in the East Midlands, need to know whether they'll be allowed to stay in business. Much of my work as an MEP involves seeking to head-off daft and damaging EU regulatory proposals. Sometimes we succeed, but too much bad law gets through. It is unhelpful and misleading for Newton Dunn to dismiss these events as "euro-sceptic scare stories". They are real threats to real jobs. Yours faithfully, Roger Helmer MEP