Earth to the Guardian, come in please

The Guardian is showing utter cluelessness on ending the opt-out of the working time directive which begins with the classic quote:

The European parliament cannot win. Either it is dismissed as an irrelevant talking shop, or it is accused of representing the Eurocracy throttling the life out of Britain.

well some people complain because this is what it does and we disagree with it. Where the EU standing up for the nation states, or even shock horror their constituents, to do whatever they wanted against ever growing tide of regualtion from Brussels curtailing more and more freedoms then even eurosceptics like me would praise it. However as it is, it is merely a talking shop that rubber stamps the Eurocracy throttling the life out of Britain in order to pretend that said Eurocracy has some kind of democratic legitimacy.

Then on to the meat

The deal on offer in Strasbourg is that the opt-out would be wound down over three years, but the directive would be made more palatable to employers, in a series of amendments being voted on by MEPs. Most important is the one that allows an employee's average hours to be calculated over a full year, so that businesses can cope with erratic ebbs and flows in demand, in return for more reasonable hours the rest of the year.

Note the unwritten assumption that people are allowed to work only at the sufferance of the EU, and that it is only right that the number of hours that we work is controlled from there. The opt out, which is actually the way things have always worked in the thousands of years before the birth of the EU, being a diviation from this normal practice. But isn't our EU master nice giving allowing the number of hours being taken as the average over the entire year, let us praise our benevolent master for this great gift of being allowed to work.

However as always the market has already started to react. There is very high employment in the UK, unlike France and Germany which did not take the opt out, and so employees labour has become more valuable as there is less of it around. Employee's ,having seen the work life balance problem way before it came into the Eurocratic focus groups, have individually decided to use this power to try and get the work life balance that is correct for them, which even the Guardian admits is happening:

The length of the week worked by British employees is subsiding, without Europe's help. The average full-time working week is now a little over 37 hours — compared with 40 hours 10 years ago.

So the invisible hand of the market works it's magic and everybody gets what they want, without regulation. While in highly regulated 'core europe' unemployment hits levels not seen since the Great Depression. And the Guardian seems to think that regulation is a good thing.