My new automotive is a reminder that we’re STILL beneath the thumb of Brussels

The first outing in a new car should be a moment to savour. It shouldn’t make you want to pull over and thrash the bonnet with a tree branch, in the manner of Basil Fawlty.

The Audi which has just arrived on my drive comes equipped with an unwanted battalion of EU-ordered ‘safety’ features, which are now starting to infect dashboards across the country.

If it thinks I am too close to the centre of the road, the car wrests the steering away from me and yanks itself back.

It did this when I tried to avoid a pothole, creating the alarming sensation of fighting my own car for control and leading to a dangerous over-correction.

The Nanny State dashboard also beeps constantly about the speed limit – it gets extremely tiresome to be told off for going 21 mph in a 20 mph zone – and includes something called ‘Audi pre-sense’, which purports to calculate the risk of me crashing by analysing my (admittedly not perfect) driving style.

I don’t want this. I want the simplicity of my first car, a throaty MGB with just a fuel gauge, a speedometer and a sound system stuck on Radio 1.

It was the product of 1970s British engineering, so it didn’t start every time, but when it did it was an unadulterated pleasure.

‘But don’t worry,’ I told myself, ‘I will defuse the road rage by finding a master reset to banish the irritations.’

Nope. After grappling with the manual for several hours and consulting various petrolhead forums on the internet, I learned that Brussels has banned me from overriding the warnings.

Yes, I can mute the alarms by navigating several screens – a distracting and therefore risky process – but it resets every time I turn off the ignition. So, for short journeys, I just grit my teeth rather than navigate multiple toggle buttons.

Even this small mercy is expected to be extinguished by new EU laws to ban temporary overrides. Why is this happening, when we voted to leave the EU eight years ago?

It is not, as Basil would suggest, just the Germans who started it: it’s the product of pan-EU rule-making over which we have no control and which applies to all new cars sold in the European Union and Northern Ireland from July 7.

When I rang Audi to complain, the reaction was effectively a long sigh and, to paraphrase: ‘Our hands are tied.’ A sympathetic corporate character said: ‘As we make cars for the entire region, any vehicle sold in the UK will be to the same standard of safety specification as an identical vehicle sold within the European Union.’

He said shortcuts could be programmed into the dashboard to override the beeps, but none of them worked for me, and even if they ever do they still have to be activated for each journey.

The speed beeps rule was passed five years after Brexit in EU regulation 2021/1958, which decreed that all new cars, vans, trucks and buses should be fitted with an Intelligent Speed Assistant, which detects the speed limit using traffic sign recognition cameras on the vehicle or Global Positioning System-linked data.

And we have EU regulation 2019/2144 to thank for the Emergency Lane Keeping System which hijacks the steering control or, in the words of the regulation, ‘corrects the trajectory only when the driver is unintentionally leaving the lane’.

In my case it intervened when I was on the left side of the road and in control – but when I tested the system by briefly taking my hands off the steering wheel it completely failed to act.

The continued sway which Brussels holds over our lives is a potent political weapon for Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, the father of Brexit, who told me when I mentioned the Audi: ‘Control, control, control. Big Brussels government just gets bigger. I hate it.’

Brexit, and in particular the UK’s failure to maximise its benefits, has hung over the Conservatives since the 2016 vote, with Boris Johnson winning his 80-seat majority in 2019 after vowing to cut through the sclerosis of the Theresa May premiership by ‘Getting Brexit Done’.

The party’s perceived failure to do so contributed to its catastrophic losses in this year’s election, which were at their most devastating in pro-Brexit areas.

There are currently some 6,700 individual pieces of ‘Retained EU Law’, of which more than 4,300 remain entirely unmodified by the UK Parliament.

Many of the EU rules are largely unseen and affect regulatory issues, such as the UK’s adoption of the EU’s hugely bureaucratic data protection regime in 2018.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a Europe-wide law that imposes a blizzard of rules and red tape on any firm that processes and stores customer information, with those failing to comply facing hefty fines and reputational damage.

It forces companies to draw up an online privacy policy, which are now, on average, more than 4,000 words long – but which barely anyone reads or understands.

The pointlessness of this red tape was demonstrated earlier this year when Tax Policy Associates, a think-tank, inserted a clause into its online privacy policy offering a complimentary bottle of ‘good wine’ to the first person to notice it.

It took three months before the hidden clause was spotted.

But it is the rules that have a more direct impact on consumers, such as nannying dashboards, that are the most politically toxic.

Another well-meaning but vexatious change, which Brussels introduced three weeks ago, bans the use of disposable plastic bottles with separate lids – the attachment ensures the cap gets recycled when the bottle does.

This means that British shoppers either nick their lips on the annoying lid or risk spraying the liquid as they struggle to wrench it off.

As one commentator put it last week: ‘While we are no longer tethered to Brussels, we’re still tied to their bottles. Quite literally, we’ll just have to suck it up.’

With Sir Keir Starmer promising to ‘reset’ London’s relationship with Brussels, the slow process of repealing EU laws is likely to go into reverse.

As part of a deal to improve our trade terms with the bloc, Sir Keir is expected to agree to ‘dynamic alignment’.

It might sound like something that would flash up on my new car’s dashboard as another tedious safety feature, but it actually means slavishly copying EU rules as we head down what Boris calls ‘the road to serfdom’.

Prepare to be beeped at for the rest of your lives.