So the European Union has slapped Temu with a €200m fine for selling illegal products. One must ask: is this a genuine attempt to protect consumers or yet another desperate lurch by a bureaucratic leviathan trying to justify its own existence? The British regulators, ever eager to follow Brussels’ lead, are now bleating for ‘stronger consumer protection’.
Never mind that the very concept of ‘protection’ in a free market is a slippery slope to socialist nanny-statism. The real scandal here is not Temu’s dodgy toasters or counterfeit handbags. It is the EU’s pathetic inability to compete with Chinese e-commerce, combined with a pathological desire to regulate everything that moves.
We are witnessing the death rattle of a once-great civilisation, now reduced to fining foreign companies for selling cheap goods. Meanwhile, British regulators, desperate to prove their post-Brexit relevance, parrot the same tired mantras. The Romans had bread and circuses.
We have fines and press releases. At least the Victorians had the good sense to let the market sort itself out. Temu may be a cesspool of knockoffs, but is a state-sanctioned oligopoly of Amazon and John Lewis really preferable?
One longs for the days when a gentleman could buy a dodgy watch in a back alley without the panjandrums of Brussels demanding their pound of flesh. This fine is not consumer protection: it is the EU’s last, flailing attempt to control a world that has left it behind. Britain should take note before we too become a museum of regulatory corpses.
