It's amazing what people will consider a benefit of the EU

Now that the Brexit vote has happened it's probably a little late or these stories about how the European Union has made our lives better. But even so they're trying - and even so they're getting it wrong:

Britain’s exit from the EU will mean the end of Brussels’ attempts to make UK households install energy-efficient light bulbs. But one couple’s experiences show why such bulbs are still worth bothering with – even if older types are still available.

Pete and Linda Powell said they had saved £400 a year after they switched almost all the bulbs in their house to LEDs. The retired couple, from Skipton in Yorkshire, switched their bulbs from low-energy halogen bulbs three years ago.

That we didn't need a law to make us do this is shown by the fact that the switch saves £400 a year. We do generally assume that consumers are not drooling morons and thus do things which benefit them voluntarily.

However, this demonstration of the EU's concern for our wallets is still wrong. Because of course there has been no legal move whatsoever to shift us all over to LEDs. What did happen was that there was a legal move (to the point of a ban on the sale for domestic use of them) away from incandescents.

Unfortunately that legal ban came into effect before LEDs were ready for prime time, leaving people to have to switch to the markedly more expensive and less efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. And yes, while they fit the same holes as the earlier bulbs that's not enough, some investment in changing the set up was also necessary.

So, what we actually have here is that the free market, entirely unadorned, would be shifting us around about now all quite naturally from incandescents to LEDs. The EU's intervention forced us all, at some cost, to shift to the intermediate and not very good technology of CFLs before the move to LEDs.

This is not, to put it mildly, a victory for the powers of intervention in that free market unadorned.

But then there's that horrible and pernicious tale out there that the ban on incandescents was actually lobbied for by the light bulb manufacturers who had these lovely factories capable of making CFLs but which no one wanted to buy....and yes, one of us has been a cog in the global supply chain for the lighting business for some decades. Our opinion is that that horrible and pernicious tale is not mere cynicism about regulatory capture....