Here's one more reason to hate the EU...

Gee, they can't even make the fight against terrorism a priority.

A vital anti-terrorism proposal has become blocked by a squabble within the European Union, to the dismay of the Government.

EU officials said yesterday that the impasse threatened to make a mockery of repeated pledges to launch an urgent, pan-European war on terrorism. The row centres on who should craft and amend the legislation and could drag on for months or even years.

The deadlocked initiative is a "data retention" plan to force telecoms and internet companies in all 25 EU states to keep telephone, e-mail traffic and internet access data for up to a year. The information would then be available to police and law enforcement agencies investigating serious crimes.

Britain has promised to make a data retention law a central goal of its six-month EU presidency, which ends in December.

After the Madrid train bombings in March last year, Britain, France, Sweden and Ireland drafted a proposal for an agreement that could have been law by the end of this year.

But the European Commission and European Parliament said that, for legal reasons based on the founding treaties of the EU, data retention was a form of business regulation.

Therefore, they and not national governments should take the lead in drafting any new law, they argued.