Into the wide blue yonder

Date: 24/07/1997

The Commission's internal e-mail service recently featured some very useful motoring information: full details of the locations of the 36 new radar traps the police have installed in central Brussels.

Those lacking access to the Commission's e-mail will doubtless be hoping the list will soon be on one of the growing number of EU websites.

Among the latest Internet operators are the Luxembourg presidency, the UK's embassy to Belgium and the UK delegation to the EU.

In a press release from the British Permanent Representative Sir Stephen Wall, the ambassador was almost poetic about the development, saying: “I hope our website will become the essential jumping-off point to the wide blue and gold-starred yonder.”

The European Parliament is now pressing the Commission to put at least some of the Official Journal on the Internet, too.

The Parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee has actually voted for a 25&percent; reduction in the amount of cash it gives the Commission to advertise EU works and service contracts in paper form.

British Liberal Democrat MEP Graham Watson, the committee's rapporteur for the 1998 draft budget, said: “In this age, it is wholly preposterous that the Commission should spend so much money on producing paper so few people read.”

Cynics have suggested that removing the first three words from his remarks would make them applicable to any time since 1957