The sale of halogen bulbs could be banned as part of the EU's energy-saving driveEvery other weekend for the past 15 years, I seem to have found myself standing precariously on top of a wobbly step- ladder, attempting to replace one or other of the numerous halogen light bulbs inset high into the ceiling in the rooms of my house.A bit like putting out the rubbish or trimming the hedge, it’s one of those tedious, mildly dangerous man-jobs you have to do in return for the even more tedious chores your other half does.The risks include burning your fingers (halogen bulbs get very hot); injuring your neck (because they’re harder to reach as they don’t hang from a piece of flex); and being driven mad with frustration (they are the devil to unscrew and replace).So, I suppose, in some ways, I should be delighted by the news that — possibly as early as next year — the European Union plans to phase out these wretched things and replace them with more energy-efficient models, which supposedly produce better light and last much longer.

If you’ll forgive the pun, I’m incandescent with rage at what looks very much to me like yet another piece of typically, bullying, ill-thought-through piece of EU legislation which, in the guise of making things better for all of us, will only end up making things worse.reviews of karcher vacuum cleanerFirst, let’s consider the cost. clean bagless vacuum cleanerWhile a halogen spotlight can set you back as little as £1, the LED bulbs that the EU wants us to replace them with can cost as much as £25 each (though can be found cheaper).triple motor vacuum cleanerHaving counted up the number of halogens in my home — eight in the kitchen, two in the bathroom — that could mean a whopping £250 of bulbs I would be expected to buy as replacements as a result of EU diktat.

Yes, I can afford it, but there will be many who can’t — especially, I fear, all those pensioners who have already been frozen into fuel poverty by all our EU-driven renewable energy policies and will now find themselves half-blind in lighting poverty, too. And there’s the sheer ruddy inconvenience.Sure, in the long run, LED bulbs may, indeed, be better for us — apparently, they’re as much as 90 per cent more efficient than halogens and capable of producing brighter illumination in a range of colours and tones, including one similar to daylight — but the speed of change being forced on us by the EU is going to make the transition a nightmare and a campaign group of manufacturers called LightingEurope is trying to delay the ban until at least LED bulbs (like the ones above) may, indeed, be better for us - apparently, they’re as much as 90 per cent more efficient than halogensPartly, it’s true, there’s a measure of self-interest here: having invested so much money developing halogens, their members — such as Philips and GEC — would quite like to see a financial return before halogens are phased out.

(Something that should bother you, too, if you’re a shareholder).But the proposed delay makes sense for the consumer, too. Not only are LEDs very expensive and hard to obtain, but will be difficult to use with the dimmer switches and wiring circuits used by many halogen bulbs. What annoys me even more, though, than the cost and inconvenience of the proposed ban is the anti-democratic nature of the exercise.A report published yesterday by the Eurosceptic think-tank Business For Britain revealed that two-thirds of all the laws passed by our Westminster Parliament over the past 22 years have been made or influenced by unelected commissars in Brussels.These proposed regulations on light bulbs are merely the latest in a long list of EU rulings apparently designed to micro-manage every last detail of our lives, from the kind of sprays we can use on our allotments and the size of the receptacle from which we pour our olive oil in restaurants, to whether or not our cigarettes are allowed to be flavoured with menthol.

They’re even proposing that we should pay motor insurance for our ride-on mowers, mobility scooters and golf buggies.The reason, it seems, is that a few months ago, a man in Slovenia was injured falling from a ladder hit by a tractor trailer on private land, with no insurers admitting liability. So, as a result of this immeasurably trivial incident in a country far, far away, the European Court of Justice has decided to protect the entire Continent from such future disasters with a blanket new insurance ruling.And as we’re all signatories to its rulings, there’s not much we can do to escape them.Many of the more pettifogging of these regulations seem to concern the banning of high-wattage versions of domestic appliances.Last year, you’ll recall, the EU announced a hit list including hairdryers, lawnmowers, smart phones and kettles. Before that it was vacuum cleaners that were targeted; this year, it was coffee percolators (which, in future will have to be fitted with a cut-out device so the hot plate doesn’t stay on for too long).

The idea behind these bans may, indeed, be a noble one — to help us all use less energy, perhaps even to force manufacturers to make their products more efficient — but the method employed is little short of totalitarian.Yes, it won’t matter a jot to most of us whether the vacuum cleaner we use is 900W or the now illegal 1,600W. But suppose, say, you’re the owner of a poodle parlour or an industrial cleaning firm and you want something a bit more powerful.What right have a bunch of commissars in Brussels, over whom you have no democratic control, to dictate to you what you can and cannot buy?Under regimes such as the Soviet Union, of course, people grow wearily used to having their consumer freedoms taken away from them — for their own good, of course — by the Government.In the free West, though, we have got rather used to a more people-friendly system of supply and demand, where we — and not the state — make our consumer decisions. So, how alien and disturbing it felt for those of us who had to queue last summer for our last ever chance to buy a powerful vacuum cleaner;

or for those of us who, as I did, had to scour the internet to try to find our final stockpile of those marvellous 150W incandescent light bulbs.They used to fill the room with a wonderful warm glow and illuminate it far more brightly then their horrible, headache-inducing, flickery low-energy replacements.Thanks to the EU, for the first time in our lives, we were experiencing how it must have been to live behind the Iron Curtain.How does the EU justify these swingeing impositions on our freedoms? Why, by invoking the ‘environment’, of course.By far the majority of the EU’s most intrusive legislation stems from its carbon emissions-cutting climate change agenda.These days, environmental issues have no borders and, therefore, are the ideal justification for action by a supranational organisation, such as the EU, with its power to over-rule the decisions made by individual nation states in the name of saving the whole world from ‘global warming’. And also because, despite the increasing evidence that climate change isn’t quite the problem it has been cracked up to be, many people still feel warm and comfortable at the idea of making small sacrifices in order to save the planet.