Open Europe, the eurosceptic think-tank, has re-used the old gimmick of calculating the total volume of EU legislation by pages, pointing out that it would stretch 31.7 miles. This illustrates, they say, that "the growing burden of EU over-regulation is a serious problem for businesses and even voluntary groups".

Sounds fine, but they do not mention that a large proportion of this EU regulation is designed precisely to cut bureaucracy and red-tape for businesses by setting a common EU norm to replace 27 divergent national standards in the EU's single market. In calling for regulations to be repealed, "Open Europe" is rarely specific. For instance, do they want to repeal legislation that allows a company to register a trademark once, to be valid throughout Europe? Without that legislation, companies would have to register their trademarks 27 times over, going through different hoops and bureaucracies in 27 different countries, filling in 27 different forms etc.

No EU legislation can possibly be adopted without the agreement of a very large majority (and often unanimity) of the member states themselves, so the very idea that the EU has "imposed" unwanted and unnecessary legislation on member states is somewhat simplistic. Yet the eurosceptics go on trying to portray the EU as an all-powerful bureaucracy spewing out unwanted legislation that member states have no choice but to accept. Any attempts to counter this myth and to explain how the system actually works are denounced by them as "EU propaganda". Their lies and hypocrisy make you sick.

There is, however, one thing the EU can do - and is now beginning to do - to reduce the number of pages of EU legislation. This relates to when it adopts legislation amending pre-existing EU legislation (and the bulk of single market legislation nowadays is precisely that: an update or review of existing EU law, rather than new EU law). Rather than adopting countless directives amending another directive, it should recast the original directive, keeping a single text rather than a string of them on any one subject.

The Constitutional Committee of the European Parliament is at this very moment preparing a change to the Parliament's Rule of Procedure to facilitate the adoption of consolidated legislation of this kind. At least this will lessen the ability of eurosceptics to exaggerate the volume of legislation that emanates from the European Union.