Cameron’s EU banana skin

After Britain once again annoyed most of its European partners with David Cameron’s unsuccessful presidential election defeat, we thought it time to look at a great British past-time: “Euro-mything“. The most famous of all came in the mid-1990s when it was reported that Brussels had imposed a ban on bendy bananas!  In 1994 the EU did actually adopt quality standards on fruit, but no fruit was banned, and the guidelines were put in place so buyers know what they are getting (click here for the EU’s directive for guidelines on bananas). The directive was repealed in 2008 after the EU grew concerned that growers were throwing out perfectly tasty bananas because they were curved a bit too much. A complicated and wacky series of events, but EU trade laws are an area Law and Economics applicants should be thinking about, particularly given their recent media attention. Politics students, what are your impressions of the increasingly fraught relationship between London and Brussels? And what does the willingness of the British media to report Eurosceptic half-truths say about British attitudes to the European Union?