Of course now that the UK has left the EU, nobody really has any ideas of what, specifically, they want to deregulate.
Asbestos in food? Attractive new opportunities for US pharma to sell opioids? Houses no longer need windows? EULAs on jeans, making you pay day?
Europe is very comfortable watching it from the sidelines. I'd say it's an interesting experiment, but unfortunately the last two years have shown it's rather boring and everything turns out exactly as anyone with even basic grasp on reality has said it would.
Should all new vehicles need the latest safety equipment that increase their insurance cost and put them outside the budget of the poor? It’s always possible to err on the side of zero percent risk at infinite cost.
One of the Leavers' arguments was that the UK wouldn't be subject to the EU's regulations. They claimed that the EU rgulations were stifling and created too much of a nanny-state. Johnson's parliment is pretty much duty bound to create an environment of reduced regulation, otherwise they would be reneging on one of their most important platforms.
Things like blatant crime should still be regulated, but creating an easier regulatory environment for businesses in the UK is absolutely a given next step.
Actually Johnson isn't going to be focused on reduced regulation.
He will be focused on regulatory alignment with the US as he desperately needs to sign a US-UK FTA. And yes the US has a lot less regulations than the EU e.g. chlorinated chicken but in other areas it is not less but just different.
UK businesses are going to find the next decade extremely painful as they deal with trying to support US and EU regulations whilst also dealing with customs controls at the border. So all of the pain with none of the benefits.
UK businesses are going to find the next decade extremely painful
This seems over-board.
Firstly, like in every country, most UK businesses don't sell abroad at all. So no, most businesses aren't going to find the next decade any different to the previous.
Secondly, businesses that wanted to sell into both EU and US markets already had two sets of regulations to deal with and would have done no matter what. That is no different to what it was before either.
Finally, businesses have been dealing with customs controls at the border for as long as international business has existed. That's hardly a big deal either.
He will be focused on regulatory alignment with the US as he desperately needs to sign a US-UK FTA.
No he doesn't. Plenty of countries around the world have perfectly fine economies and growth despite having no FTA in place with either the USA nor EU. It's nice to have but not essential for anything.
Now, "regulatory alignment" doesn't have to mean adopting the exact same rules as the USA. That's the EU's approach but it's often not the best approach. A simpler way to gain the same benefits in most cases is just regulatory recognition. In cases where there's no actual fundamental disagreement between systems, but actually unifying them is unwanted for reasons of political independence (i.e. retaining the ability to fundamentally disagree in future) both countries can simply choose to accept products that comply with each other's sets of laws.
The EU freaks out about this approach because the goal of the EU is not to make business easier but to unify Europe into a single country, and abolish the existing ones. Obviously to do that mutual recognition of standards is useless. Only obedience to a centrally controlled set of regulations will do the job. A lot of people in the UK have spent so many years under the thumb of this system that they find it hard to conceive of any other way.
One of the other Leaver arguments were that there would be no reduction in access to the EU internal market, and that the UK would be able to get even better access to those markets by leaving.
Yes, I know it isn’t even coherent to expect “the EU” to grant the UK better access to the domestic markets of 27 nations than those nations give to each other, but when I raised this the response was either “that proves we should leave” or “that’s just project fear”, often preceded or followed with some comment about BMW, champagne, or the Spanish tourist industry.
Point is, they will renege on their promises on this topic no matter what, so while your argument would normally be sensible, nobody can rely on that this time.
Regulations are not a single homogeneous entity. They could remove 5% or 95% of EU regulations and have kept their promise as long as the changes where a noticeable net positive.
They could claim to have removed the regulations on the shape of fruit (which don't really exist in the way they were described) and secured some kind of fishing deal and call it a success.
These things are complicated and to be argued; speaking in absolutes is not helpful or justified.
The most that can be said is that the Tories (and the harder Brexiteers) have a significant majority, which makes moves towards deregulation more likely - that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, or will happen without considerable push-back from people who are not quite so ideological (or who are, but of the opposite persuasion).
But wait until you see the reduced regulations you will end up with.
US is demanding regulatory alignment in agriculture and food safety as a condition of the FTA for example. And the US has significantly higher rates of food borne illnesses compared to the UK due to these weaker regulations:
I thought Germany was already propping up the less productive countries? They haven’t raised domestic salaries but their productivity remains high so they have a massive trade surplus which then then use to provide cheap loans to consumers in other euro countries who buy more German goods (because, stereotype or not, German stuff is generally damned good).
The mechanism through which wealth is redistributed among EU countries is the EU budget. The wealthier countries (Germany and several others) are net contributors to the EU budget, whereas the more economically challenged nations are net receivers of EU funds. However the EU budget is quite tiny in relation to the EU economy, so the redistribution of wealth among EU members that takes place in this way is modest.
Modest is putting it mildly, it's pretty much irrelevant as a net transfer (would take something like 50+ years to align countries, and by then other factors are magnitudes of order more salient in the output).
EU budget always had a kind of political and strategical value attached to it — e.g. to protect agriculture, which is sound strategically (to be able to feed yourself in isolation if it comes to that), but the deeper symbol is that Europe is very afraid of famine. In the 1940s, it all began with cooperation around coal, energy. The EU, at least originally, is built to ensure individual countries can't F with the really important stuff (between each other, nor shoot themselves in the foot).
Evidently, the mission has been met with some difficulties.
The subsidize with money, but not blood. The poor red states send their young off to die in wars for the blue states. If you add some value to the death of the young, it evens out.
The further the UK diverges from EU rules, the harder it will be to trade across the two zones. That’s going to cause ambitious companies to leave for the massive opportunity in the EU, not to set up shop in the UK.
Likely outcome is that the UK will diverge barely at all in terms of the actual rules, but will rename a lot of things and give it all some sort of "Britishness" spit and polish, and most people who voted leave will be happy with it.
Customs controls need and are going to be imposed whenever there is no official agreement in place (and overseen by the ECJ) for regulatory alignment. And the ECJ oversight is a hard red-line for the UK.
Which means that it isn't a sliding scale. It's black or white. Either you fully align with oversight or you don't. And if you don't then you are hit with the full suite of custom controls.
This still leaves the question whether it's worth it to "setup shop" easily in the UK with a market of ~66m people or the "hard" setting up shop in the EU with ~500m people. You can't just set up in the UK and then operate in the EU, that's the whole point of the EU...
I wouldn't. Why can't you use banks that agree to follow rules you like and be monitored by people you trust while I can use banks that agree to follow rules I like and be monitored by people I trust?
> Why can't you use banks that agree to follow rules you like and be monitored by people you trust while I can use banks that agree to follow rules I like and be monitored by people I trust?
There are 2 reasons.
The first is because ultimately you rely on the state's monopoly on legitimate violence to enforce those rules. If you want protection from fraud or simply outright theft, you need to rely on the mechanism of the state. And the state might determine that a contract or transaction, though voluntarily entered into by both parties, is still unenforceable because it unconscionable or harms the general welfare.
The other reason is the experience of the Great Depression, where for instance over 5000 banks failed in the US prior to the creation of deposit insurance. People making prudent decisions in good faith can still collectively make a system unstable. And if you lose you savings that's a problem for you, but it a few million people lose their savings that becomes a problem for society.
The devastating financial crisis triggered by short sighted greed from entities which should have been better regulated.
Obviously that is a simplification, but it shows why letting each customer choose for themselves how unregulated their bank should be is recipe for disaster.
Because every now and then these two banks will have to work together and then there will be such minor issues like "will the receiving bank just pocket the money while claiming to have never gotten it?"
A common set of rules across all banks ensures that they'll continue to work with one another.
There are some regulations i agree are unnecessary and slow things down far too much, but as soon as the UK starts cutting corners on safety they ought to deserve no business at all.
Asbestos in food? Attractive new opportunities for US pharma to sell opioids? Houses no longer need windows? EULAs on jeans, making you pay day?
Europe is very comfortable watching it from the sidelines. I'd say it's an interesting experiment, but unfortunately the last two years have shown it's rather boring and everything turns out exactly as anyone with even basic grasp on reality has said it would.