Remember the Lisbon Strategy? In March 2000, the EU agreed a ten-year strategy to make the EU the world’s most dynamic and competitive economy. Key to that strategy was the reinforcement of science.

Yet today, not only has the Lisbon Strategy disappeared into the usual Brussels fug, but the European Commission has come up with a new strategy, one which seems designed to drive away what is left of one of our remaining innovative industries.

So bad is the environment in the EU for research-based companies that Novartis, the healthcare company, recently moved its research facilities to the United States and GlaxoSmithKline now has its research base in Philadelphia. From 1990 to 2001 the number of research employees in the German drug industry fell by 36 per cent. Scientists are talking with their feet: the Commission’s survey shows that 400,000 European science and technology graduates have emigrated to the US.

Far from altering the landscape to entice such companies to stay, the Commission’s desire for ever greater control has led it to come up with a new regulation which effectively tells pharmaceutical companies to go to hell.

Member states are, under existing rules, in charge of policing the EU ban on advertising of medicines. Under Regulation 726/2004, however, the Commission has demanded that it be given central control, despite there being no evidence that the system is not working.

And the proposal comes with a killer clause. The Commission is demanding arbitrary power to impose fines of up to 10 per cent of a company’s entire global turnover if it determines that it is at fault.

Clearly, if companies are in breach of the rules they should suffer the consequences. But even if there were no pressing need to make the EU environment more conducive to pharma companies — and there is — the level of the fine is out of all proportion.

Take Novartis. Its global turnover is $28.2 billion. Compare a possible $2.82 billion fine with the maximum fine that the Commission seeks to impose on counterfeiters: €300,000. Both offences are designed to protect public health. But clearly counterfeiting is more damaging than advertising.

This is the regulatory cancer at the heart of the EU’s ills. Far from promoting competitiveness, it treats business as an evil that needs to be stamped on.