This latest directive from the EU in Brussels on the maximum power rating of vacuum cleaners is an admission that Western Europe faces a huge electricity energy shortage.

The reason for the imminent electricity shortage is a direct result of a previous EU directive on large combustion generating plants which were deemed to be emitting carbon dioxide.

Britain’s coal fired electricity generation was a triumph of modern engineering, put into the dustbin of short-sighted bureaucrats in Brussels.

With the sort of ingenuity typified by the engineers of the last century, with modification these large coal fired generators could revolutionise Britain’s market gardening industry by utilising waste heat which used to go up the chimney stack to heat very large glasshouse complexes and, at the same time, pass the associated carbon dioxide into the large glasshouse complexes to provide vegetables of all sorts, which would grow and ripen more quickly all year round.

What a defeatist lot we have in charge of our country’s future.

N Gardner Carlisle Avenue Swindon