Brussels Celebrates Defeat of Bureaucracy by Bureaucracy
LONDON — Britain and the European Union have achieved a historic diplomatic breakthrough by producing approximately 200 pages of paperwork explaining how to eliminate paperwork.
The agreement, intended to simplify agricultural and food trade, promises to reduce the administrative burden imposed after Brexit.
According to The Guardian’s reporting on the UK-EU food agreement, the proposed changes would eliminate many export health certificates, inspection charges and related restrictions. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will oversee much of the detail.
Implementation is expected within about two years.
This means British businesses may finally be allowed to sell a sausage to France without producing a document proving that the sausage is, in fact, a sausage.
Naturally, the document abolishing these documents requires extensive documentation.
Brussels Celebrates Greatest Administrative Achievement Since the Stapler
European bureaucrats have reportedly discovered an exciting technique for reducing administrative complexity.
First, create a complicated system.
Second, establish a commission investigating the complicated system.
Third, produce a lengthy report explaining why the complicated system is complicated.
Fourth, replace it with a complicated agreement.
Finally, congratulate everyone on reducing complexity.
The British government has enthusiastically embraced the process.
A civil servant described the breakthrough as revolutionary.
“Previously, exporters needed paperwork to prove their products were safe,” he explained. “Now they need paperwork explaining why they no longer require paperwork proving their products are safe.”
He described this as the triumph of administrative modernisation.
Unfortunately, the explanation required three additional forms.
Leaked Memo Shows Officials Worried the Agreement Might Be Too Short
An internal memo from the British negotiating team, seen by this publication, records a late-stage concern that 200 pages “may read as insufficiently serious.” The author proposes adding a glossary, two annexes and “a section on sections.” A reply in the margin reads: “Agreed. Nobody believes a deal with fewer than 300 pages.”
The memo is dated by hand, in biro, with a coffee ring over the signature.
British Sausage Declared Safe After Years of Diplomatic Suspicion
The negotiations also address one of Europe’s most terrifying strategic questions: whether a British sausage can cross the Channel without threatening continental civilisation.
For years, British food exporters have confronted an obstacle course of certificates, inspections and technical requirements.
The proposed agreement would remove many of these barriers.
Government officials estimate that the changes could eventually provide billions in annual economic benefits.
Britain’s taxpayers are understandably curious about how much economic damage could have been avoided had politicians discovered this remarkable concept earlier.
One Yorkshire butcher offered a practical assessment.
“I’ve been selling sausages for thirty years,” he said. “Nobody ever asked one for a passport until politicians got involved.”
Brussels would undoubtedly insist that the passport should contain biometric information.
Unfortunately, sausages don’t have fingerprints.
This has not prevented the establishment of a European Working Group on Processed Meat Identity.
Agency Report Counts the Forms
A review by a food standards body, cited by officials during the talks, found that a single consignment of mixed pork products had previously required fourteen separate documents, nine stamps and one handwritten declaration confirming that the pork was pork. The Food Standards Agency publishes the underlying hygiene rules in full. The review recorded that the average exporter spent more time on the declaration than on the sausages.
British Independence Now Comes With Automatic Brussels Updates
The agreement involves Britain aligning relevant food standards with EU rules, including future changes.
This creates an unusual interpretation of national sovereignty.
Britain can make independent decisions, provided the decisions correspond with those already approved in Brussels.
It’s rather like leaving a controlling relationship, buying your own house and agreeing that your former partner can still rearrange the furniture.
Fine Print on Page 118
Readers who reach page 118 will find a clause providing that “references to sausages shall, where the context requires, include sausage-like products, sausage-adjacent products and anything a reasonable person would describe as a sausage after three drinks.” The clause is followed, without explanation, by a table of acceptable casing diameters.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham can nevertheless present the deal as an important victory for British exporters.
Farmers and food producers may genuinely benefit from cheaper, simpler trade.
The difficulty is that politicians spent years explaining why mountains of bureaucracy represented national necessity, then negotiated another mountain of bureaucracy to remove them.
Within two years, British sausages may once again travel freely across Europe.
British citizens, meanwhile, will continue financing the civil servants responsible for making that possible.
And somewhere in Brussels, a committee will begin discussing whether the agreement needs an appendix.
Only 600 pages.
Five Humorous Observations
- Two hundred pages to cut paperwork. That’s like a diet where step one is a four-hundred-calorie cake. “Just to get us in the mood.”
- A sausage has no fingerprints. Which, to be fair, is probably the only reason it’s stayed out of trouble this long.
- Britain leaves the EU to take back control, then agrees to update automatically. That’s leaving the group chat and getting added back in the same afternoon.
- European Working Group on Processed Meat Identity. Somewhere there’s a man with that on his business card and he is deeply proud of it.
- A 600-page appendix. The appendix is the one part of the body nobody understands and everyone’s scared of. So, really, great naming.
