Hello and welcome to the fourth in this special series of more or less, scraping through

the statistical crime scene that is the EU referendum debate and looking for clues.

Today regulation, don't you just hate regulation, all that red tape costing us money, slowing

down business, we used to complain about our government, now we complain about the EU.

Lord's Prayer, 66 words. The 10 Commandments, 179 words.

Gettysburg Address, 286 words. US Declaration of Independence, 1,300 words.

EU regulations on the sale of a cabbage, 26,911 words.

Now I know it's just an internet meme but that's a lot of words devoted to cabbage and

this cabbage statistic has proved very popular.

We found records of it being quoted all over the place, including by the UK Independence

Party a couple of years ago. But you have to go back further than that to find its source.

To America, in the 1940s.

Barry O'Neill is a professor of political science at the University of California and he's

researched the origins of the claim that there are 26,911 words of regulation on the sale

of cabbage.

There was a cabbage memo, it was a price control institute during World War Two but it

didn't limit the price of cabbages, it limited the price of cabbage seed and it wasn't

any 26,000 words long, it was about 2600. After World War Two ended, that price control

disappeared but the claim that there was such a price control kept coming up again and

again whenever people started getting concerned about government regulation. The next time

was the Korean War. Instead of cabbage seed, the claim now was at control sale of cabbages

and instead of 2600 words, they multiplied it by 10 to 26,000. So since that time, there

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