This is a live topic again in Whitehall as many departments make heavy weather of sorting out the huge mass of EU laws.
I would start with the complex Emissions Trading scheme. Let’s suspend it as energy prices are so high. The UK version produces the highest carbon taxes making UK industry less competitive. Far from cutting CO 2 the scheme drives the closure of UK business and makes us dependent on more imports. That adds transport CO 2 to fossil fuel intensive output from the exporting country.
Move on to taking VAT off domestic energy and make its removal from green products permanent. Put up the VAT threshold to £250,000 from the EU £85,000 ceiling to allow more small businesses to expand .Amend the fishing regulations to boost the domestic industry and expand the home fleet.
Change the myriad product specification rules. Keep a strong safety requirement but remove the detail about how you can and cannot make individual items. The ban on various hoovers showed this regulation up as unhelpful to UK business.
I have many more proposals but would be interested to hear yours.
April 29, 2023
Good morning.
Get rid of GDPR. A ridiculous law that is designed to make money for the State if you hold any data that is not your own, by charging you for it.
Get rid of VAT and replace it with a Purchase Tax.
Stricter laws on the transport and slaughter of all animal livestock, whether it be in the UK or not. Any country, whether or not it be in the EU, which does not meet our high standards cannot sell into the UK market.
I may come up with a few more later, but it is too early in the morning and I have only had one coffee. Which reminds me. Drop any duty from any country that sells into the UK market, either raw coffee beans or ground coffee. Same too with chocolate.
Let us start by not continually making the rest of the world poorer.
April 29, 2023
It is a government website, Sir John so it should be OK.
https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/headings/0901
April 29, 2023
@Mark B; Actually GDPR rules need to be tougher, especially those involving personal data lent to a first or third party for explicit purposes via internet cookies. Those who wish to scrap or weaken GDPR rules are either very ‘laissez-faire’ towards protecting their personal data or see business ‘opportunities’ involving mining others data.
Many people also find themselves on mailing-list without having given explicit consent, or are tricked into giving such consent when they believed they were consenting to a single one-time only use of such data, such as the emailing of a sales receipt for example.
I would also like to see stricter controls on data harvesting now cashless trading is the norm. Supermarkets now know more about their individual customers family life and lifestyle than the customer or their own extended families often do! The risks are even higher with loyalty card schemes, there are benign ways of rewarding loyalty to a brand or company.
April 29, 2023
Yes, not all EU laws need to be completely abolished – some need to be made STRICTER. Take the rules on compensating passengers whose flights are cancelled or delayed, or who are bumped off a flight due to overbooking. Currently the compensation is too little, and too weakly enforced. Much MORE, and INSTANT, compensation would make life much better for passengers and would be VERY POPULAR electorally. It could be promoted as a Brexit WIN, which would be clever politics too. But we have a brain-dead government which is too subservient to the EU to do anything that separates us from them or which uses our Brexit freedom to diverge.
April 29, 2023
Indeed certainly the GDPR inconvenience & tax racket.
April 29, 2023
They do not have it in the US or most of the rest of the world just another excuse to tax and interfere.
April 29, 2023
@Ashley; Actually under Federal Law, or at individual State legislative level, the USA have some quite strict data protection laws, for example CCPA (California), HIPAA & COPPA (at a Federal level) and various DNT legislation at either State or Federal levels.
California Consumer Privacy Act
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act
Do Not Track legislation
April 29, 2023
The problem with GDPR in this country is the poor quality of our civil servants who designed the rules to be all encompassing when it was actually intended to target commercial enterprises selling on the internet particularly American ones. I don’t suppose it applies to organisations that maintain a database of who that deem to be thought criminals although it probably should.
April 29, 2023
+1
April 29, 2023
Anything, and I mean anything linked to net zero which is the biggest threat to our economy and way of life. I’m sure the policies are too many to mention.
April 29, 2023
Indeed but actually nearly all government regulations do more harm than good.
The Covid vaccines as seems very clear from the statistics, did more harm than good too. They could after all do little else for young people who were never even at any real risk anyway.
April 29, 2023
VAT of school fees will clearly raise far less money than it cost and do huge harm to education too.
April 29, 2023
It should not be a question of cherry picking.
We should start with a clean slate.
In the same way, we should have started on WTO terms and taken it from there.
April 29, 2023
Agreed.
April 29, 2023
Hear Hear
Our internal laws are our concern, but the EU/UK Withdrawl Agreement should be repealled …in fact any international treaty that effects our UK laws should be reviewed and reveiled in manifesto
April 29, 2023
@Peter; Well some of us suggested a WTO exit in the first place…
Such an exit was rejected, I suspect, because it carried to high a political price for a govt with a non-interventionist mindset towards giving formal State aid and/or higher taxes (which we ended up with anyway…).
April 29, 2023
jerry,
Various players – including Benn – put the kibosh on No Deal.
However, with an 80 seat majority and determination we could be in a better place than we are now.
April 29, 2023
@Peter; That was my point. By mid December 2019 and Boris with his fresh 80 seat majority, what people such as Hilary Benn wanted had become utterly irrelevant, even more so what the now unseated leader of the LibDems, or those who had voluntarily stood down as MPs wanted! The Brexit ball was totally in the Conservative parties court, for their MPs to do as they wanted, it was they who took a WTO exit (and BRINO…) off the table, no one else, it was they who accepted the Withdrawal Agreement, and the NIP.
April 29, 2023
People don’t realise how the EU controlled (and thanks to Tory treachery, STILL CONTROLS) every aspect of our lives. Take the increasingly popular electric bikes. Why is their speed limited to 15.5 mph? Because in reality they are limited to 25 kph – due to the stupid and cowardly EU. In the US the speed is a more realistic 20 mph. They are not dying in droves over there due to such a ‘high’ speed, so why can’t we lift the really frustrating low speed in the UK, now we are out of the EU? It would boost the popularity of these bikes, which should make the environmentalists happy too! Will you suggest this, Sir John???
April 29, 2023
Absolutely agree.
April 29, 2023
Well said Peter, I cannot think of anything good that came out of the EU so dump the lot.
April 29, 2023
Maybe, but you can’t think of much else either, can you?
April 29, 2023
As predicted patiently and repeatedly by Remain, you will continue to hear more about the European Union thanks to leaving it than you ever did as a member country, and there’s no end in sight to this.
Geography is composed of fact.
April 29, 2023
Yep, and JR’s suggestion that we change product specification laws will have one sure outcome – yet more grief and costs for our exporters who want to sell into the biggest and best free trade area the world has ever seen, the EU.
Reply Nonsense. under my proposals they would be free to make things to EU specs if they want! Why do you hate freedom?
April 29, 2023
Of course manufacturers and producers can make things to any legal spec they like.
And when they try to export them to the European Union they will find them subject – quite rightly – to rigorous import checks to make sure that they do indeed conform.
Seafood exporters – for example – have often simply given up as the delays make freshness impossible.
Well done Leave voters.
April 29, 2023
In 2022 the biggest market for UK producers was the UK domestic market, 64% of GDP.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN02815/SN02815.pdf
Without taking into account various distortions exports to the EU made up 15% of GDP, only a quarter of home sales, while exports to the rest of the world made up the remaining 21% of GDP.
Before the referendum I used to say that 12% of GDP went as exports to the EU, so any idea that our exports to the EU have collapsed since we left the EU and its Single Market does not hold water.
We could do what Theresa May wanted and adopt EU standards for our domestic market, which would then apply to about 79% of our production. Alternatively, as about a third of our exports to the rest of the world go to the US:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7593/
we could adopt US standards for our domestic market, which would then apply to about 71% of our production. Exporters to the EU and to other countries around the world would have to be allowed to meet the requirements of each of their destination markets; in fact they should be required to do so by UK law, not just by the laws of their destinations or by any applicable WTO rules.
Of those two alternatives – align our regulations with the EU, or with the US, the first would cover 79% of our production while the second would cover 71%, so clearly the first would be slightly preferable, but much better would be to have the 64% covered by our own regulations under our own democratic control and have the rest required to meet the requirements of each of their export markets.
There could be rare cases where the UK could not accept some of the requirements of an export market on ethical or political or practical grounds, and then we should simply not export to them.
April 29, 2023
JR. Can you give us a couple of days to sort through 124,854 EU Regulations that were legally binding on the UK and all EU member states, as issued by Brussels without any local modification.
Plus 4,168 Directives that layed down certain results that must be achieved by the UK and each Member State when transposed into national laws.
Plus 30,737 Decisions. EU laws, legally binding upon those to whom they are directed. Relating to specific cases in individual or several Member States, companies or private individuals. Recommendations and Opinions are not binding. but often build into future EU laws.
I can’t wait to find out, how that lot above, has been whittled down from the headline 4,000 rules to 800 currently! (see: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eu-origin )
April 29, 2023
Oh our seafood goes straight onto EU boats and has no trouble getting into the EU.
The EU is in its death throes – expect max nastiness.
April 29, 2023
Lynn Atkinson
Very well said Lynn. Like many and especially my friends living abroad they are getting very edgey the way things are going over there. All the markers for a fall are slowly falling into place and will onlyget worse when the other poorer countries join. Funny how the misuse of funds and cash “payments mishap” is not making news. The cracks can only get wider.
April 29, 2023
What’s with the “our”, Lynn?
The fishers now land it directly in the European Union, so there’s no longer any value-added work to be done on it here. Result!
April 29, 2023
I sincerely hope your right Lynn, I am a lover of justice and cannot think of justice better than the demise of the EU, bring it on !
April 29, 2023
How about eating our own seafood ourselves? And eating our own food generally for that matter. Really, its not that difficult….
April 29, 2023
Pass a law making it compulsory, then.
See how that goes down in seafood-hating, battered haddock-only Yorkshire.
April 29, 2023
“Hate freedom”? It is Brexit which has taken away freedom. Freedom to trade, freedom to live in 27 different countries, freedom to work together with our neighbours to address climate change, migration, security etc. All thrown away for this potty inward-looking Brexit
April 29, 2023
Wrong, we have been reduced to helpless dependency
April 29, 2023
@Lemming; I’ve know of several British people who went to live in France, Germany, Spain, and some who came to live in the UK from European countries, all BEFORE the UK was a member of the old EEC, I have also known people who went to live and work in Australia, the USA and Japan, how did they ever do so without your beloved ‘EU freedoms’?
All Brexit has done is stop people, such as yourself I suspect, from waking up one morning and deciding that they want to go to ‘reside’ in some other EU county by evening, that was never a freedom, it was and still is an abuse of EU laws and the hospitality of the host country.
April 29, 2023
*In your rather particular opinion.
April 30, 2023
@NLH; No not an opinion, I stated a fact, or are you seriously suggesting, before your beloved EU ‘Four Freedoms’, emigration from the UK was impossible?! Also, emigration to the EU26 from the UK is still possible, post Brexit, but it takes more than a bargain bucket E* or Ferryboat ticket and a whim to achieve.
April 30, 2023
If you take the trouble to learn the language, and to engage properly with people in any country, then I think – if you have anything to contribute – that you’ll be very well received.
The assertion that one’s presence is some kind of abuse is self-evidently ridiculous.
April 30, 2023
@NLH; Trouble there is, far to many expats were not bothering to follow the rules [1], even after the EU matters much easier, hence why some were complaining about their likely post Brexit status.
The only person being “self-evidently ridiculous” is you NLH. But at least you have now accepted the fact that Brexit does not prevent lawful emigration from the UK to the EU. 😛
[1] nor am I talking only about UK expats either, many German expats in Spain got into problems in the mid 1990s because they had failed to registrar their residency in Spanish but had simply disappeared from the German tax system…
April 29, 2023
Lemming. The EU countries I have lived in all had requirements that you must have sufficient funds to support yourself (in one recent case that included €700/month mandatory health insurance), or else you had to leave within 90 days. I soon learnt “freedom of movement” is not “freedom to live, or settle”. Of course, lots of people flout the rules but they take risks. After retirement the situation is different.
April 29, 2023
You are well named Lemming.
April 29, 2023
Tom Paine said of English Conservatives – I may paraphrase – “they will fight to the death for the right to have no rights”.
How little changes.
April 29, 2023
@NLH; You miss the point, at least we now get to choose to have no rights!
We no longer risk having unelected Eurocrats removing our rights – or indeed forcing us to have new ‘rights’ that a majority do not want, having perhaps expressly voted not to have such rights – as has happened recently in some eastern EU member states…
April 30, 2023
QED. Thanks Jerry
April 30, 2023
@NLH; Yes, QED to Brexiteers, unless you are still missing the point, which I suspect you are… 🙁
April 29, 2023
Trader
If you export to any Country in the World you need to meet their standards, which may be higher or lower than at home, so the EU is no different to anyone else.
The manufacturer then makes a choice to make to one standard which will satisfy all, which may be over specification for some markets, or to pick a lower level specification and restrict your opportunities, which may not matter if the market is rather small.
Then of course we have equivalence where some countries are allowed to sell goods because it is felt their manufacturing spec whilst different, is acceptable.
Thus you make your commercial policy decision/choice on which will benefit your Company the most.
April 29, 2023
@Trader: You’re without a first clue! You do realize that even now EU26 companies have to manufacture to their intended markets specification, not only their own, for example the BMW Mini sold in the EU26 is a very different car than that sold in the USA, just as the car made for the UK market is more obviously different to the EU26 version.
As our host says, there is nothing to stop a UK manufacture making EU26 spec products for sale in the EU26, just as happened when the UK was a member of the EU, any domestic electrical product made in the UK has to have a Euro plug for the EU26 market, those made for the UK market have to have a BS1363 plug, Operating menus and manual need to be language localized to their intended market(s). The ‘extra costs’ you cite are already present!
@NLH; You mean those EU import rules/checks etc that have often stopped cheaper, better quality, products being imported from the USA etc? Duh…
April 29, 2023
Tommy Cooper and Benny Hill passed away long ago, yet we still laugh at the ironic nonsense they created. We now have the spectre of Norman Wisdom as PM slipping over EU mess, but Mr Grimsdale would perform better.
April 29, 2023
So Portugal and Romania should be in an economic, monetary and political union because …? They on on the same land mass? Despite (originally) different languages, cultures and economies?!
By extension – geographically speaking – Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, India and China – to name but a few – should also be in the European Union. Who says where Europe ends and Asia begins – a line on a map? And why not include Africa while you’re at it? It’s only a hop across the Straits of Gibraltar.
April 29, 2023
And of course Russia! Maybe Portugal and the U.K. can join the Russian Federation after the EU and NATO are gone – 2024? 😂🤣
April 29, 2023
Well, the depressed ex-pit villages of Co. Durham are in economic, political, and monetary union with leafy Surrey, aren’t they? And the back streets of Baltimore with Silicon Valley?
Would you care to explain the intrinsic problem if the people want it, as they have said by their votes that they do?
April 29, 2023
Yep, it was an underhand and sly organisation. Full of dishonest, lying trash in the top ranks!
April 29, 2023
Removing VAT on domestic fuel will never be done because it won’t apply to Northern Ireland as they have to stick to the EU minimum of 5%.
This would expose the lie that 97% of EU law has been disapplied to the province.
This is the same for other proposals like VAT thresholds
But most of all the government employees don’t want to diverge and they always get their way.
April 29, 2023
Even if the UK did not have the power to stop 5% VAT on fuel in NI, the UK can apply a complicated snooker system like the EU: Introduce a Cost of Heating allowance in NI based on 5% of the cost of fuel!
April 29, 2023
✔️ 😃 great Idea Bloke, there are always ways if you really look!
April 29, 2023
Today we hit a new record. Wind is generating 0.49gw, I think this is the lowest I’ve ever seen it.
Can someone tell the clowns in charge 100% of nothing is nothing
April 29, 2023
Ian+Wragg
No point mate they are not listening to anything where common sense needs to be applied
April 29, 2023
….and the billions spent
April 29, 2023
Sir John
I agree with your suggestions.
In addition, I would like to see the removal of landfill tax. It places a huge burden on local authorities and of course, that’s passed on to us.
April 29, 2023
Landfill tax is nothing to do with the EU. But yeah, you know what you voted for
April 29, 2023
There’s plenty on google about it.
11. Waste – European Environment Agency – europa.eu
https://www.eea.europa.eu › … › 11. Waste
The Landfill Directive sets a target of reducing the amount of biodegradable municipal waste landfilled to 35 % by 2016, i.e. a maximum of 19 million tonnes.
April 29, 2023
I am a retired man in North Cambs so I cannot give any advice on detail.
But Richard North, an expert on the EU did say, before Brexit, that there is a coffin lid of regulations which are holding up our development. Once we break out of our coffin, however, there is a double coffin lid of international regulations which the EU has subscribed to and which we cannot lift.
If that is any use, use it!
April 29, 2023
Was the hated ‘Ports Directive’ done away with?
I would suggest that the trade bodies are the best people to ask about which regulations we could do away with. But my worry is that your government has left things too late.
April 29, 2023
P.S. Isn’t the pressing need to sort out a farm subsidies that suppress the production of, er, food in favour of the ‘environment’?
April 29, 2023
Ditching EU laws that apply here is a can of worms. The fossil fuel lobby will want climate change and CO2 laws they don’t like removed. The anti-rewilding faction on the far right will want all environmental protection laws scrapped. The contruction industry is concerned about their practical need to retain health and safety laws. The City is worried about financial equivalence standards so they can trade with Frankfurt and Paris. It is obvious that we should keep product standards, or what is left of our manufacturing export industry will collapse. Similarly pharmaceutical standards and food standards
As the Conservative party looks at a generation in the wilderness, we should leave this to the incoming Labour administration after the next election. Rushing it now is clearly foolhardy and has the potential to cause immense harm to the economy
April 29, 2023
Labour will of course takes us closer but overall you are correct. This is a meaningless debate prolonged by the dying embers of the Thatcherite right. Nowhere have I read a list where doing away with a law would specifically improve our economy. We get generalisations.
Reducing corporation tax at a stroke would make a greater and speedier difference.
April 29, 2023
SG : “Ditching EU laws that apply here is a can of worms. The fossil fuel lobby will want climate change and CO2 laws they don’t like removed.”
Not all, if indeed any, EU laws are tougher than the UK on the use of fossil fuels. For instance 33% of Germany’s electricity is produced from coal.
Whilst the sale of new ice cars in the UK is banned from 2030, the EU has allowed ices to continue until 2035 and can exist after 2035 if they use e-fuels.
Unfortunately the authoritarian eco Marxists in the UK are in control.
A free/capitalist government would allow ANY zero CO2 emission vehicle to be allowed on the roads, not just the designated and inferior bevs which will fail through lack of electricity and infrastructure. For instance ices running on green methane, which already exists.
April 29, 2023
I’d remove the Ports directive – nobody wanted it in the UK.
April 29, 2023
Agree
April 29, 2023
This is a meaningless article in the greater scheme of things.
Sunak’s accepted the EU’s dominion in Northern Ireland and therefore accepted the EU’s right to undermine the very nature of what the UK actually is and yet Mr Redwood and his crony MPs no doubt still support this PM.
April 29, 2023
Sunak and his government are EU supporters ….I’d welcome any party of government that puts UK people first
April 29, 2023
I see no way forward on the Northern Ireland Protocol/Windsor Framework, because nobody there supports the obvious alternative of setting up a system of export controls on goods destined for carriage across the border into the Irish Republic unless it is a reciprocal arrangement, which the EU rejected in 2019.
There is no obvious immediate reason why we should reimpose routine checks on goods coming in from the EU when we stopped almost all of them with the advent of the EU Single Market in January 1993, and nothing has changed about the generally high quality of EU goods just because we have left the EU.
April 29, 2023
Denis as your average reader am afraid I don’t know what your contribution means – for instance do you agree with the working of the Windsor Framework or are you against it ? Is if OK for NI or is it not?
April 29, 2023
I am against it, because either it will gradually separate Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK or it will keep the whole of the UK closely aligned to the EU.
April 29, 2023
So many EU laws were nodded though routinely causing the public to be unaware of where so much fault remains concealed. Symbols communicate well to protect consumers. If products were compelled to display marks of bureaucratic ‘contamination’ by bad EU law the UK users would be free to buy what they prefer.
April 29, 2023
And don’t forget to add a bit of “Gold plating” by UK civil servants…
April 29, 2023
John I simply do not have a clue, because for 40 years our Parliament passed everything the EU proposed, very many times, without even a discussion or a vote, thus thousands of laws have been showered upon us from Europe.
Indeed worse than that, even if we proposed and passed some of our own rules during that period, they still had to fit in with what the EU would allow for a member State.
Thus everything that has gone on the statute book for the past 40 years or more requires examination to see if it should be removed, modified or retained in a more suitable form if necessary.
I do not subscribe to the view that everything from the EU is bad, but those rules which disadvantage us with regards to being competitive on the World markets, or disadvantage us at home, should be given close examination
April 30, 2023
+1
April 29, 2023
I totally agree with your comments and indeed with your direction. Unfortunately I believe the cabinet is full of Remainers who dream of a return to the fold. Life was easy when all they did was rubber stamp EU diktats. I fear nothing will ever be accomplished. However that’s preferable to Starmer and Co.
April 29, 2023
VAT on domestic fuel was a Conservative government introduction. It was announced by Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1993 (at a higher rate than currently charged, 8%). The Conservatives tried to increased it to 17.5% in 1995, but lost a Westminster vote, so they could not implement that increase.
Claiming VAT on domestic is inherited EU law is an attempt to re-write history.
Reply Yes I opposed it in cabinet
April 29, 2023
Britain has left the EU and could therefore remove VAT from energy bills. However N.I. is still largely IN the EU. It is that that stops the removal of VAT from UK energy bills.
April 29, 2023
Is VAT on home energy at 5% an EU policy? So not as Peter Parsons claims just a UK tax?
I don’t see how ending it in the rest of the UK is a problem for N Ireland, they could have an alternate fix like a 5% discount on their bill only available in N Ireland.
We are constantly being told how much better off NI is with joint arrangements so perhaps this is the cost to them that they have to comply to the EU demands, this would then start to highlight them.
April 30, 2023
EU Member States have always had a level of domestic choice relating to things such as VAT. VAT on female sanitary products in the UK is another example that is often cited yet, in the Republic of Ireland, there is no VAT on those products and there never has been throughout Ireland’s membership of the EU.
EU member states have the right to retain VAT-exempt status on goods or services that were VAT-exempt when a country became a member state. Domestic fuel was VAT-exempt when the UK joined the EEC. It was the Conservatives who chose to change that status 20 years later.
April 30, 2023
Peter, did they also have the right to change domestic fuel back or not? Or once you agree to impose an EU suggested new tax can you never change your mind?
April 29, 2023
Review all EU Environmental Regulations and scrap those which do not suit our own national circumstances.
April 29, 2023
100% agree
Lets clean up the UK, lets protect our environment and lets scrap the climate change committee and law
April 29, 2023
Good start. We need to clear out the alien laws and also reduce the State. Can’t reduce taxes until the State is cut.
April 29, 2023
So you want all our property law scrapped because of its French (Norman) roots, and its having replaced Saxon allodial title then.
Good luck getting the Tories to accept that.
April 29, 2023
glen cullen
+1000% on that one pal.
All of it “biggest #### up since Mons” to quote the old squaddies.
April 30, 2023
Exactly. The EU law in this area prohibits new water infrastructure being built, and makes dredging rivers a bureaucratic nightmare – they preferred to create an atmosphere of water shortage and flooding incidents caused by climate change. We need to break out of this.
We also need to end EU regulations concerning rail, the division between owners of track and trains. We should liberalise the whole sector and try to create an environment where entrepreneurs can revive old lines. Such schemes are always judged by the civil service to be too expensive (due I believe to overinflated costs in their feasibility studies, and potentially overengineered track and station specs).
May 1, 2023
SimonR, not true on various accounts:
1/ the EU Water Directive (which stopped being applied on 1/01/2020) had never prevented the UK from building new reservoirs. Other countries, Spain and Portugal in particular, have built a number of new reservoirs or desalination plants (Italy, Greece) these last ten years.
If no new reservoir has been opened in the UK since 1992 it has nothing to do with the EUWD but with the refusal of the UK private water companies to invest in such works.
2/ Since then (01/2020) the EUWD has been made by the UK government into UK laws that UK water companies were supposed to continue following. Only now is a new reservoir to be opened in 2029 by Portsmouth Water and Anglian Water has a project for two new reservoirs by 2035.
And their decision again has nothing to do with the EU.
newcivilengineer.com, 01/09/2022,
‘The challenge of building more reservoirs to ensure UK’s water resilience’.
April 29, 2023
It’s a big one but I’d suggest contemplating a complete replacement of MIFID 2. It’s a monster of a piece of regulation, so long it’s inconceivable any one person knows everything that’s in it. It’s impact has been a mushrooming of nit-picking reporting, a useless additional cost in capital markets, and the destruction of efficient capital markets for smaller companies. Regulation needs to be short, clearly written and principles based.
We must press on with abandoning the EU’s irrational opposition to GMO crops. Likewise the early signs are the EU may treat AI as the medieval church did the printing press. If it does, it’s essential the U.K. diverges on this.
This all being said it sounds like we should be retaining EU environmental regs, and maybe strengthening them, on river and sea pollution. It seems extraordinary the govt are allowing the own goal of water companies dumping sewage into rivers – the reporting on this could be a caricature of project fear (except that it’s true).
April 29, 2023
Sorry, R1: this idea that the brakes on GMO should be removed is invalid. For whatever reason, I believe the EU were right on that one. The same with AI and transhumanism. Our materialist culture has no idea where these things are leading.
April 29, 2023
My belief is that very little will be done because our remainer government has no wish to and for sure the civil service will fight to maintain a close alignment with the EU. It is, as I pointed out yesterday, just a step in changing government from Brexit to remain, starting with the undemocratic coupe to oust Liz Truss, a useless to the future of the Union Windsor Framework, a long line of spurious bullying claims by the scribes and their union, with no support for the ministerial victims from Sunak. We are being set up for a return to the EU by Labour and what may be left of the conservatives after 2024. I just hope that the electorate wakes up to what is going on.
April 29, 2023
The primary target has to be getting things working in this country again. Some of these rules and regulations, such as the Working Time Directive, just complicate and confuse “you can’t work more than 48 hours a week unless you opt out” or the GDPR directive “your data is private, but if we cross envelopes and send your bank statement to somebody else it’s just a harmless mistake”. “I can’t talk to you about your wife’s sickness without her permission, Sir” “But she’s sick, in bed and asleep”.
We claim EUR 250 for a flight landing 3 hours late, but can’t claim for passports, medical procedures, tax documentation, etc. arriving 3 months late or not at all, because the State which can pay, won’t pay. Neither will it force its employees to work to contract. This attitude spreads into banks, utility companies and the larger corporate sector. The poor self employed trader or IR35 contractor is clearly stuffed at the end of this line. No performance from the state and larger corporates, but paying tax to keep them in their home studies.
The EU and EU law and lefty attitudes have soaked in to the fabric, but are now only part of the story.
April 29, 2023
I do not feel there is any real political will to do anything other than talk about it. If the politicians are unable to see the benefits then we are losing the battle.
April 29, 2023
What is the point when our government has been taken over by the globalists. Net zero will be the death of our country, importation of vast numbers of criminals will make our cities ungovernable, attacks on our home produced food supplies will make us hungry, mismanagement of the countries finances will make us all poorer, Marxist infiltration of our education system is brainwashing our children. There is only one solution and that’s to vote out all the current main parties and install politicians who want to improve the lives of the British people. Look to the USA and see where we are heading if things are not changed and changed soon. It is the enemy within we need to be very worried about. I believe the next election will be our last chance to save the UK before censorship shuts down any opposition and I don’t mean the opposition in the HoC’s who are part of the problem.
April 30, 2023
Agreed.
We’re currently going to hell in a handcart with the Tories. Labour would speed it up slightly, but the destination’s the same.
April 29, 2023
It is not just E.U. law I want to scrap. Our whole body of Law is a mess. Huge amounts of law – far more than anybody may know – is being churned out each year. One may argue that all this detail is desirable to make the law clear but lawyers spend ages at great public cost in arguing about how this now detailed law should be interpreted. So it doesn’t even produce clarity!
I have a different vision of law which all the lawmakers or lawgivers of ancient time would have agreed with. I would like all the laws of the United Kingdom to be written in clear English within the space of one book (about 200 pages) to be distributed to all (nowadays some individual new laws are longer than that). All the ancient codes of Law were much shorter than that- Hammurabi (Babylon);Lycurgus(Sparta);Draco(Athens) or any original religious law, be it The Ten Commandments or Mosaic law. I rather think what cannot be fitted within one book of about 200 pages isn’t really worth having as Law.
So I reckon all our laws should be superseded by just one book of law. Then Parliament could concentrate upon holding the executive government to account instead of perpetually churning out new laws people are necessarily ignorant of.
April 29, 2023
We need to get rid of the Committees and revert to the House of Commons examining every bill. That way Governments will choose what they really want to enact as time itself is a limiter.
April 29, 2023
Most bills of laws are actually divided into chapters, themselves divided into parts, then clauses, then subsections, paragraphs and subparagraphs. On top of that the legislative process done within Parliament involved ‘the separating out of documents’, ie most bills amend previous Acts of Parliament, which means the bill when passed will not give the complete text but much more likely something like ‘Law So&so is amended as follows: subsection x.y.z is substituted by a.b.c , completed by d.e.f.
Many pieces of legislation often amend numerous other previous pieces of legislation meaning that even MPs trying to scrutinise a new law would need to refer to different Acts of Parliament .
In most other legislative environments (i.e., most other countries) the so-called ‘Keeling scheduling system’ ensures that any relevant bit of text in the original legislation is printed out together with how it would appear once amended by the new law (so that people can readily understand without needing multiple documents in front of them).
Westminster does not use Keeling schedules.
(‘How Westminster works … and why it doesn’t’, W&N Publ., 13/04/2023
Look for example at the present Illegal Migration Bill at bills.parliament.uk
Just that one is 70+ pages long.
So your 200-page book of UK laws is not likely to be soon available in libraries and bookstores.
April 29, 2023
What of rule of law
BBC reporting that we transported, without a UK passport, a Sudan doctor (who works in the NHS), on one of our emergency flights. People have free will, he went on holiday, he could stay in Sudan with his family, he could make his own travel arrangement …what of rule of law
Who made that decision and why ….why not take everyone on emergency flights
April 29, 2023
@glen cullen; The operative words in those reports, not just from the BBC, was “a NHS Doctor”. Perhaps had this and previous Tory govts spent more money training, and retaining, British born NHS staff the NHS would not be short staffed and thus overly reliant on Far-Eastern and African doctors etc.
Are you also really suggesting that those UK passport holders who were transported to safety by other countries should have been refused, after all why should a country evacuate anyone other than their own, even if it means leaving seats empty?!
April 30, 2023
Something is definitely wrong with which courses we fund at University, why fund courses with no work route at the end of training when there is a great demand for trained graduates? A little google search says it is government that restricts places, but I’ve heard claims it’s the BMA that puts out quotas??/
Student Room says “Still year after year the British medical schools are rejecting the capable candidates due to government imposed restriction on the number of places for medical …”
Big Issue “ Professor John Ashton, former president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, told the Big Issue that historically, it has suited the British medical profession to keep in place a system that maintains a hierarchy between native and overseas-trained doctors. “Whether by discrimination or disadvantage,” he says, overseas-trained doctors “tend not to finish up at the top of the pile.”
I wonder if this is because overseas Doctors don’t spend 5 years in uni then two foundation years and skip a year or two training so are lower grade doctors.
Mumsnet blame insufficient FY1 places: “22 Nov 2022 — Apparently it’s lack of hospital places for trainee/junior doctors.” … 8 Jun 2022 — Main thing is lack of experienced staff who can train. There’s not the capacity to work/train/oversee with current experienced staff.”
14 Jan 2023 — NHS England must train more doctors and nurses in Britain and reduce its reliance on foreign staff, its chief executive has said.
Guardian “ 14 Jan 2023 — A new school set up to boost the number of doctors in England has been told it will not receive any funding for domestic students ”
Migration Watch “Apr 2023 — Summary · In 2022, the number of overseas doctors joining NHS England outnumbered the number of British medical students to enrol in medicine”
April 29, 2023
‘His unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion’. That was Edmund Burke, Bristol, 1774.
But national populism is on the rise …
April 29, 2023
Wonderful profound stuff Hefner.
April 30, 2023
@EUF; Except those profound words could equality apply to those who worship rule from Brussels.
I’m no scholar on Edmund Burke, and I doubt either you nor @hefner are either, but didn’t Burke speak in favor of greater self-determination (certainty with regards Colonial America), thus were he alive today would he not be objecting to centralized rule from Brussels?
April 30, 2023
The weak point of that otherwise respectable position could be summed up in two words: “Dominic Raab” (or whoever else of like “calibre” you might name)
April 29, 2023
The Equality Act, and the Discrimination Acts that were consolidated into the EqA in 2010, had foundations that EU directives and ECJ decisions previously commanded and entrenched. While we cannot blame the EU altogether for Batty Hattie’s toxic legacy aka the Public Sector Equality Duty, a courageous government would take a long hard look at the EqA and set about reducing its range and impact. There is surely scope to do so while ensuring that not one person with a deservedly protected characteristic is left any worse off (as opposed to professional offence takers and grievance mongers, who very much need to be left worse off).
April 29, 2023
All they need to do Denis is align it with the number of males or females doing the correct qualifications to take the positions in the first place so if e.g. 100 men take further maths and only 30 women why should a disproportionate number of those women get tops jobs requiring that skill.
April 29, 2023
I don’t have a list for removal but I do have one we should re-implement – that all advertising for consumer products (at least major ones) should contain origin status. A couple of years ago I bought a new washing machine based on its description and spec which suited my needs. However, it was not until the thing was installed and I read the instruction manual that I discovered it was made in China and it is a well known make. Never would have bought it if I’d known. I’m not expecting it to have a long life, even though I paid a fair price for it. Also, I don’t wish to purchase EU goods if I can avoid it.
April 29, 2023
@graham1946; Actually that EU law is meaningless, the country of origin simply means the last place of significant assembly or processing, thus a product could contain significant ‘manufacturing value’ from one county but have its country of origin lawfully declared as another. That UK, EU even USA made product could be full of Chinese manufactured components and unless you lift the lid you’ll never know!
Perhaps had western capitalism not sold its soul, in the name of maximizing profits, buying cheap off-shored manufacturing capacity to then sell the (now imported) product at the same ‘factory gate’ price as if the product had been made in their own factory. Since the mid 1970s we have learnt the value of everything, but know the worth of nothing…
April 29, 2023
It used to mean something before the EU. Just shows what a load of cobblers EU law is and is confirmation that we need to be rid. Doesn’t that sort of thing also apply to food, so that some meats can be classed as British if it has some kind of minor thing done to it? It’s all wrong and designed to cheat the consumer. We need to be done with it all or we will end up back in by default, which seems to be the aim of the blob.
April 30, 2023
@graham1946; The problem being, average Joe no longer gives a flying fig about where something has been assembled or were components/ingredients come from, they buy on price. The problem isn’t so much those EU laws but Globalization, much the same arguments are had in the USA, indeed wasn’t it the backbone of Trumps campaign in 2016 and his ongoing MAGA message?
April 29, 2023
unsubscribe to all EU nonsense effective immediate
April 29, 2023
Gets my vote
April 29, 2023
Of course it does.
April 29, 2023
Wouldn’t it be easier, better even, to legislate to remove all laws that originated in the EU, and then legislate specifically for regulations still required, which could be introduced with a firm British flavour for common sense.
I can’t see it working out well for civil servants to sift through so many items, for they will be sure to want to keep far more than we require.
CANCEL THE LOT – and start afresh where absolutely necessary!
April 29, 2023
Listening to the Remoaners one is lead to the false impression, pedalled by them, that all EU legislation is perfection incarnate. Certainly those who like the EU are usually those who do not have the imagination to strike out on new ventures – this characterizes the higher management of most large businesses. Where is the spirit of the Victorian era? Brunel had built a complete railway in the time a modern ‘Review and consultation’ for such a thing now takes. I remember a late 1970s article commenting on the ‘brain dead’ nature of upper management in many firms.
Truss had some ideas and that really frightened those in the Parliamentary Party who don’t want to think.
The EU regulations? Cut the Gordian knot and get ride of them all. Effectively, Alexander created a new world by doing that.
April 29, 2023
No EU law should apply in our system of national tax management today ; we are free from the bureaucracy of Europe and we must follow our own democratically decided rules . I don’t need a list of these impediments in front of me – they all should be scrapped . Trading with the EU is a desirable and worthwhile process ; they must respect our needs and we theirs , nothing else should hang around our necks . We live , survive and must thrive in an international community – those are our dictates .
April 29, 2023
I believe this is the correct approach, to accept that for the foreseeable future we will continue to have many laws inherited from our time in the EU but gradually amend or remove those which are most damaging. Simply getting rid of them all in a hurry would create a degree of legal and regulatory chaos that we do not want.
April 29, 2023
I agree Denis.
Perhaps government should start with a list of all 4000 of the EU laws in the UK. Which are the priority 800 your government is trying to focus on removing?
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/browse/summaries.html?locale=en
To see the 32 policy fields.
April 29, 2023
Totally agree Denis. That said, Brexiteers need to be on their guard against unnecessary retention of EU laws were such retention might aid future expatiated re-joining. So UK parliamentary time does need to be spent reviewing some ‘big ticket’ regulations or laws that in doing so metaphorically increase the width of the Straits of Dover, and at the same time perhaps but not explicitly narrows the width of ‘the pond’ to our west…
April 29, 2023
This should be noted:
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/mike-galsworthy-brexit-has-failed-and-we-must-be-ready-to-rejoin-step-by-step/
“Mike Galsworthy: Brexit has failed and we must be ready to rejoin, step-by-step”
“New chair of the European Movement gives surprise backing to Labour’s cautious approach”
April 29, 2023
@Denis Cooper; Your point being what, other than perhaps being very naive! As Tony Benn said (paraphrased) in 1975, having just lost that years EEC membership referendum, ‘a battle has been lost, the war has not’, did any Brexiteer expect Europhiles to do something Europhobes did not?…
April 29, 2023
The point being that it should be noted, as stated clearly enough for most people..
April 30, 2023
@Denis Cooper; Except something so obvious doesn’t need to be “noted”, doing so simply gives oxygen to the idea of Rejoining!
If the UK does end up rejoining the EU it will not because of the like of the European Movement but because Brexiteers failed to make Brexit work, in the same way as if the UK ever returns to mining coal it will be because we failed to make the alternates work, not the campaigning skills of Mr Scragill and his Socialist Labour Party…!
April 30, 2023
Then don’t bother to note it, if that is how you feel about it.
April 30, 2023
@Denis Cooper; I haven’t ‘noted it’, although you have, meaning yet another Rejoin URL reference shows up in Google searches etc beyond the original site! 🙄
At times Denis I think you just like posting URLs…
April 29, 2023
The UK money to the EU is only just starting to reduce following the withdrawal payments.
We should be told of the savings. Eg
£3bn pa saving in not paying prostitution and drug taxes to the EU.
£Xbn saving not paying the EU tax on imports from the RoW.
£Xbn saving from not paying the membership fee.
£Xbn saving from EU student loans provided by UK taxpayers
£Xbn saving from paying EU student university fees in Scotland
£Xbn saving from the reduction of tax credit benefits to children living abroad of EU citizens in the UK.
Have your government actually stopping paying or not?
April 29, 2023
I dont think the net zero lunacy can be stopped unfortunately….
April 29, 2023
That’s what they want you to think ….so you’ll just comply
April 29, 2023
We must fight against it, we all know it is a scam to fill corrupt pockets
April 29, 2023
‘Everyone else’ who lives in the U.K. … I should proofread – sorry.
April 29, 2023
The EU Ministry of Truth is taking control of internet media, naming the providers including Google, Twitter and even Wikipedia. They will have to try even harder to suppress and censor what is deemed to be misinformation, or face heavy fines. Misinformation of course means anything which disagrees with the Commission. Let’s hope that the UK version is not a repeat.
And please can we avoid the forthcoming spy in the car regulations which report drivers movements?
April 29, 2023
To help decide which laws to keep, I would first ask for analysis and details of previous monitoring assessing these regulations’ impact.
* When were they introduced?
* What was their purpose?
* Does this purpose still apply?
* What benefits have they brought over doing nothing?
* Since their introduction, has technology moved on?
* How much investment do market newcomers need to make to comply with them?
* What are the administrative costs of complying with them across industry or government?
* What common law and other legal mechanisms are in place providing similar protection if they were abolished?
* What is the impact of scrapping them?
With this information, it will be much easier to see which regulations are still needed and which need reform. It will support rules that provide value, while savings from those that do not will be quantified.
April 29, 2023
There’s no analysis; just look at the ‘plastic bag tax’, no post introduction analyse produced. It hasn’t improved the environment but its made money for the exchequer.
Has it reduced the amount of polluted plastic in and around our rivers and coastline ….no one knows, but if you criticise it, you’ll an climate change denier
Politicians couldn’t care two hoots about their laws once introduced ….that’s why they’re adverse to repealing them
April 30, 2023
You are probably right, but that is why we should insist on it for everything they do.
Of course, even with evidence to the contrary, they may still ignore it. Just look at the poor results of minimal alcohol pricing in Scotland or the success of the libertarian approaches to Covid in Sweden and Florida. So MPs should add sunset clauses to these laws to automatically scrap them if they do not work.
April 30, 2023
I like your idea of ‘sunset clauses’
April 29, 2023
Removing the laws is not the problem. The problem is getting the people who use (hide) behind them to sign up for the task.
I worked with a company bringing about a massive change program and getting the staff on side was a real problem. We managed with the agreement of the Departmental Directors to introduce a scheme where the staff in their everyday work tasks identified what part of the operation was involved and the rules and regulations, It ran for three weeks, and then analyze the collected data and found that 48% of their workload was just paper pushing cross-referencing, with no real impact on the end target resulting in the backlogs. In each section, teams at all levels were challenged to highlight all the elements that were not needed and rework the process without them. The team coming up with the most changes at each month’s end with proof they worked were rewarded with a half day leave spread across two weeks so as not to disrupt the operational flow. The sight of these people clearing their desks and walking out of the office at midday really focused the minds of other departments.
It proved to my team that given the incentives and trust to make things better for themselves with the right “marketing” by the departmental heads a lot of the old culture rubbish gets binned. It breaks the Auto Pilot always done it this way mentality.
Has the CS members of staff at all levels who are committed to wanting to dramatically change things?
The jury is out on that one.
April 29, 2023
There is no way we would ever be accepted back into the EU again because of the trouble we caused also there was a lot of harm done – the most we can expect now would be second tier status like rejoining the SM and Cu for instance – where we’ll pay full whack but have no voting rights.
April 30, 2023
That is why we will not be rejoining the EU, the Single Market, or the Customs Union.
Even Sir Kneelalot isn’t suggesting it.
April 29, 2023
You are absolutely right to focus on the cost of power to industry in the U.K. It will be a very uphill struggle to revive the U.K. manufacturing sector unless their cost of power is reasonably aligned with the rest of the world. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a number of studies showed that U.K. heavy industry – steel, chemicals, cement etc — was paying a premium of up to 50% over the cost of power in the major European countries. As you point out, allowing our industries to close solves nothing on a global basis , it merely adds to total CO2 emissions by adding import shipment costs.
April 29, 2023
The rules on fishing require fundamental change. In the first place, fishing should come under it its own department not the Environment Agency which is obsessed with saving the planet to the exclusion of feeding the nation.
In 1982, we were awarded our Exclusive Economic Zone to a maximum of 200 nautical miles from our territorial sea; however, because we were in the EU at the time, the Dutch, French and Spanish etc fishermen all said, “thank you very much” and they are still at it. British fishermen will tell you how they are restricted by quotas for individual species but foreign fishermen are able to ignore them completely when fishing in our waters and landing here. Get rid of quotas for our fishermen and keep foreign fishermen out. The quota system produces all manner of malign consequences not least is fishing companies being awarded quota and then selling it on at a profit. When a trawler over catches its quota for a fish species, it can either dump the excess at sea and be fined or land the excess and be fined. The way to prevent overfishing, if necessary, is to limit days at sea.
Fishing is only 1% of the economy so say the Whitehall wallahs. However, the fishing industry has been deprecated for decades; furthermore, fishing is an important source of revenue for coastal communities not only for catching the fish but adding value by processing them. A healthy fishing industry also can mean healthy
boat building and fitting out industries.
April 29, 2023
You are dealing with a parliament of pygmies with weak leadership on both sides of the house.
It is MPs job to know what laws to scrap, modify or change for the benefit of the UK’s economy & growth. But while they remain fixated on net zero, the UK will go nowhere. They are frightened of independence. They want the comfort blanket of the EU, so there don’t have to think or make decisions. No MP will any intelligence should support net zero; all the information is now available to show it is complete nonsense & CO2 is an important trace gas in the atmosphere. You are fighting a lonely battle, Sir John, but hooray for one voice of sanity in a mad world. Was not Jacob Rees-Mogg supposed to have sorted out which EU laws needed to go, modify or be replaced? What happened to that survey?
April 29, 2023
Yes, spot on, as usual.
What about restrictive state subsidy laws?
April 29, 2023
Remove all of them and start from scratch without all the wherefores and whys, the British way?
April 29, 2023
No matter what is discussed on this site eventually it seems that all the biggest areas of fear and complaint are all intrinsically linked by the way they are promoted by the government.
Geologist, Professor Ian Plimer: “No one has ever shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. If someone did show that, they’d have to show that the 97% of the emissions which are natural, don’t drive global warming. So the whole concept of global warming is actually underpinned by falsity.”
April 29, 2023
As regards products that we export to the EU, the EU has the right to impose specifications on the goods that they import but NOT how they are made. Employment and safety regulations in our factories and places of work are our business and nobody else’s.
And when are we going to impose penal tariffs on goods exported from countries running a dirty economy? China is opening a new coal fired power station every week and a half. China and Saudi Arabia won’t guarantee net zero carbon until 2060 and India won’t guarantee net zero carbon until 2070. Why haven’t we put proposals to the WTO?
April 30, 2023
With the Northern Ireland Protocol/Windsor Framework it is even worse because EU Single Market rules apply to all production in the province even when the products are not destined to be exported to the EU, which is most of the production including for sales to the rest of the UK. Northern Ireland does export a little more of its output to the EU than the average for the whole UK, but taking the numbers quoted above:
http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2023/04/29/which-inherited-eu-laws-should-be-improved-or-removed/#comment-1385237
I made up this allegorical story to help explain this to our cat Teddy, who takes an interest in these things:
Once upon a time there was a city with 14 similar factories producing cat food. 9 of the factories produced food only for the city’s cats, the domestic market for domestic cat food. 2 of the factories exported their products to a nearby city for its cats to enjoy, while another factory sent its entire production to a more remote city, and the remaining 2 factories produced an assortment of cat foods for numerous towns and villages in the surrounding country. So when the ruler of the city was advised that really there should be some legal rules about permitted ingredients for cat foods, and approved methods of production and standards of hygiene, and how the products should be described and the packages labelled, what would make most sense? To say that all of the factories in the city must follow the rules which applied in that nearby city which was taking the cat food produced in just 2 of the 14 factories – that would be daft – or that all of the factories must copy the 9 producing food for the city’s own cats – that would be much less daft – or that each of the factories must follow the rules which are needed for it to be allowed to sell its cat food in its chosen market, at home or abroad?
April 29, 2023
Under the Tory government nothing has changed; HS2 still on track, immigration continues, the EU still control NI and our VAT, the green revolution has quickened and the scandals just keep on coming …the only that has changed is taxation and inflation – they’ve both increased
April 29, 2023
Home Office – 28 April 2023
Illegal Immigrants – 54
Boats – 1
No change in immigration policy
April 29, 2023
[ ] lolabour
[ ] torysocialist party
[ ] green nutters
[ ] wef
[ ] monster raving loonies
There is no real democracy, who voted for anything to do with the climate and net 0? who voted for the widescale handouts to everyone at the cost of massive frauds? who voted for open door of 1m+ people in a year?
None of those points that were put to the electorate apart from last one when they voted against and were ignored? also don’t forget that 52% of people voted to leave the eu, backed up with an unanimous vote to push through the decision in last general election , when is that happening?
Meantime where is the substantial fisheries repatriation? The ludicrously onerous myriad of environmental restrictions on any development means the lefty green blob get to stop most new planning applications.. remember ~1m + new immigrants per annum. Simple maths…
April 30, 2023
Lets look at the facts and who voted for the greens
Local elections – Available 17,483 Actual 534
General elections – Available 573 Actual 1
House of Lords – Available 777 Actual 2
SO WHY ARE THE TORIES FOLLOING THESE GREEN POLICIES WHEN THE PEOPLE CLEARLY VOTED OTHERWISE
April 29, 2023
For a start all British subjects living in other countries now but who championed the brexit cause before themselves decamping to foreign shores should be recalled to live in Britain now to enjoy and see first hand their deluded work – all under the pain of losing their privaliged status as British citizens if they refuse. Now what’s that you’re saying about improving or removing laws – of course it’s all a load of total nonsense – just like next week we’ll have another example of a splash of one hundred million pounds plus at least for the coronation all medieval stuff and a complete waste of tax payers money all to facilitate a bunch of our better offs going round in fancy dress for the most part and not one voice from either of the Houses in protest – we badly need reform
April 30, 2023
How will you know how people voted in the Referendum Scarlet?
Your dreadful idea to force people to stay in the UK for ever just because they dared to vote a different way to you, reveals a lot about your attitudes towards freedom and democracy.
You can like Europe and at the same time dislike the EU.
The two things are very different.
April 30, 2023
The ones who championed the brexit cause are well known like Dyson and Lawson who has already departed this world, and then the overseas financial backers friends ov Farage who have slunk back into the woodwork – for a start
April 30, 2023
What an odd political idea Scarlet.
Effectively you want to restrict the movement of people who have a different view to you.
Got any more targets?
PS
Farage is on TV every night
Hardly “slunk back into the night”
April 30, 2023
It would be nice to think we can get rid of the lot. There would be inertia before we took advantage of that, and maybe some affected might lobby for replacement law where needed. Unfortunately our civil service and extremist campaigners would aim to put in place even more draconian laws than their gold plating of EU Directives had achieved, and the lack of scrutiny from Parliament would see they were passed in a stream of SIs.
My top picks would be anything supporting net zero, and all legislation derived from the Water Directive.
April 30, 2023
Better to get rid of all of them and then add back in only the ones we need, but tailored to our own requirements.
April 30, 2023
I dare say you are right Sir John. Let’s face it Whitehall bureaucrats are:-
a) intent on increasing their number and
b) holding on to as much as possible of the EU rules and regulations they are used to.
Unfortunately you politicians are much the same.
The vast majority of MP’s in all Parties are Remainers or Rejoiners.
That is why I for one, will never vote Con/Lab/LibDem or Green.
I don’t blame you personally for stopping where you are. At least that way you have some voice near ‘the seat of power’ but I do think something will change some time. May be the next G.E..