Whatever happened to the bonfire of EU regulations?

You have to be thick as mince to think you can leave a huge economy and trading block on your very borders and break free into a world where you set your own rules and regulations.

Leaving aside the fact that you have followed those rules and regulations for more than 40 years, helped write them, approved them, voted for them and introduced them seamlessly into your own legal system; they are also the rules which your exporters will have to follow if they want to keep exporting to the EU and the rules your importers will beg you to accept because they want to keep importing from the EU.

Now a new study from the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) finds that the UK has “little choice” but to follow a swathe of new EU regulations, in order to sell into the single market

It is rather stating the obvious but then when you are fighting the lies, fantasies and disinformation of this Tory government some authoritative research to back up your common sense is always handy.

UKICE regularly publishes a UK-EU Divergence Tracker. Remember one of the major claims for Brexit is that we could diverge immediately from all those pesky Eurocrat diktats on bendy bananas? If that were true, the tracker should be showing increasing divergence as we break free from the dead hand of Brussels.

Instead – and unfortunately for the Brexiteers – what it mainly shows is that the EU is imposing stringent new rules on supply chains, digital competition, and environmental standards and is in overdrive to enact them ahead of the European elections, while MPs in the House of Commons are sitting around twiddling their thumbs for lack of anything to do.

So, the real divergence is that the EU is being proactive, and the UK will have to timidly follow in its footsteps if it wants to keep selling into the EU,

Therefore many of the rules will de facto apply in the UK, because ‘third country’ firms must comply if they want to maintain access to the EU single market. (It is even worse in Northern Ireland which remains in the single market and therefore the rules are de jure, or is that better? Because… oh well, you get my drift.)

As the report’s author Joël Reland, puts it: “The UK is living next door to a regulatory behemoth, which it cannot afford to ignore. Even after Brexit, the EU remains the UK’s chief export market, so British businesses have little choice but to conform with new EU regulations. The main difference is that now the UK government has no means of influencing EU policy decisions from the inside.”

So, there you have it. We still do between 45-50% of our trade with the EU – it is a huge market, it is not going anywhere, it is vital to our prosperity, and we have to follow its rules if we want to sell to them. And we have no say on the rules we have to follow, because we left.

Meanwhile hopes that we would rapidly move away from the sclerotic continent and become a Global Britain are receding.

Trade with China is down, by 4.8% over the last year alone. China has huge economic problems of its own, it’s so far away that companies have realised they have exposed themselves to a very long and risky supply chain and re-shoring, near-shoring and friend-shoring are gathering pace. And it is, of course, a communist dictatorship that does not have our best interests at heart or share our values.

If only we had some nice neighbours we could trust, who share our values, to whom we are economically tied, many of whom we have been in a military alliance with for 70 years. One of whom we have been in an Entente Cordiale with for 120 years, one whose troops we trust to guard Buckingham Palace, to mark the occasion.

If only.

You can read more from Jonty on Substack at Jonty’s Jottings