The EU is simply gagging to know what we think about robots!

A chap doing research on behalf of the EU turned up on our doorstep yesterday. Had I answered the door, I would have sent him packing, of course, but as he was a pleasant young man of Indian extraction, my wife decided to give him the time of day. The survey, he said, was being conducted in a number of European countries for purpose of comparison. He then proceeded to ask any number of questions on a whole series of topics, but the ones that stood out were Robots and Language.

The main robot question was, “What conforms to your vision of a robot?” My wife was then shown pictures of variously-shaped robots and asked to choose the one that she preferred. She was then asked whether she objected to the use of robots in a number of fields, including medical, industrial and domestic.

To employ what I believe is a popular online acronym, WTF?

What could this possibly have to do with the price of fish in Costa Rica? What are these mad sods planning now? Is the next President of the EU Commission going to be a cyborg (and how could we tell anyway)? Are they planning to replace all doctors and industrial workers with robots? Will the next EU researcher to ring our bell look like ASIMO? Or is some waste-of-space bureaucrat simply trying to get through his departmental budget so it won't be cut next year (as if!).

The other major interrogative strand, as I mentioned, was Language. Should the European Union have one language? Which language would advance my wife’s career? Was teaching children languages a good idea? Should all EU documents use one language, or should they all be translated into different languages?

Again, unless this was being secretly filmed for some whacky Indian version of Candid Camera, WTF squared?

Herman Van Rompuy

Apart from the opportunity to waste yet more of our money at a time when its crappy currency is teetering on the brink of disaster, why would the EU bother asking ordinary folk their opinion on anything? The European Union’s first permanent president, that rebarbative little Belgian house-elf, Herman Van Rompuy, was last week unanimously re-elected for another two and half years as President of the European Council by European Heads of Government. I can’t remember being asked for my opinion on this: my wife certainly wasn’t during yesterday’s survey. And I’m sure we would recalled being asked if we thought another failed politician from a European pygmy state – José Manuel Barroso – would make a really terrific President of the European Commission, or whether some other physically unprepossessing nonentity would be better at vaporising European jobs, wealth and freedom. In fact, given that the leaders of the UK’s three main political parties are all deranged eurofanatics, I can’t actually recall being given the chance to vote for a party capable of forming a government which thought that British membership of the EU wasn't an absolutely spiffing idea. 

So why does the collection of fantastically expensive non-elected fascist apparatchiks who now run this country thanks to the collaborationist instincts of our own political class bother sending researchers to knock on our doors to ask stupendously pointless questions about stupendously pointless topics when they won’t allow the enslaved people of “Free” Europe to answer the one question that would result in them losing their lavishly-funded sinecures, gold-plated pensions and seemingly limitless expense accounts and either going on the dole or actually having to work for a living for a change? (Oh, hang on, I seem to have answered my own question.)

We really don’t give a rat’s backside where robots are used or what shape they are.

Every country in Europe should speak its own language and the EU should leave the writing and issuing of documents to the elected governments of each nation.

There, how cheap was that?