7 ms·

Next step for UK is to reduce regulations compared to EU to make it easier for people to setup shop in UK compared to EU.

mellosouls 7y ago
Depends on whether those regulations are socially useful or not. It's not a given that should be the next step.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  We were repeatedly told that wouldn't be the case before the referendum. It's hard to see the point of Brexit otherwise though.
  - Retric 7y ago
    At least in the US more productive states like New York and California heavily subsidize less productive states like New Mexico. I think there was real fear that Brexit was required to avoid a similar situation developing in the EU.
    - CraigJPerry 7y ago
      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). At least that was my understanding of today.
      - lottin 7y ago
        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.
        K0SM0S 7y ago
        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.
        Retric 7y ago
        EU budget is a “puddly” 150b/year. Still, with the vast difference in economic development it adds up to a 500+$ per person per year funding differences between several country’s. Which as you say is not going to change things dramatically in a given year, but it’s still meaningful over decades. Of note, England negotiated a rebate before joining. So, it’s a demonstrated issue for them.
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      The big difference was we don't share a currency with the rest of the EU and were never likely to do so.
    - mensetmanusman 7y ago
      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.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    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: https://www.sustainweb.org/news/feb18_US_foodpoisoning/ https://www.sustainweb.org/news/feb18_US_foodpoisoning/
    - briandear 7y ago
      https://fullfact.org/health/food-poisoning-US-UK/ https://fullfact.org/health/food-poisoning-US-UK/
      - three_seagrass 7y ago
        That fact check is only evaluating the very specific claim: >"One in six people in the US get food poisoning each year and one in 66 people in the UK get food poisoning each year." Saying that while correct, the two specific studies use different methodology and should not be used together in a sentence.
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      I suspect we won't see that because there has been too much publicity about it already. Workers rights are a different matter though.
- parsimo2010 7y ago
  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.
  - Retric 7y ago
    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.
    - philpem 7y ago
      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.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    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.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      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.
WilliamEdward 7y ago
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.
- dagaci 7y ago
  I would love to know what these unnecessary regulations are.
ahmedalsudani 7y ago
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.
- n4r9 7y ago
  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.
- threeseed 7y ago
  Actually that's now really how it works. 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.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Companies don't have to care about customs controls if their products pass the controls 95% of the time.
als0 7y ago
It was easier already. From what I hear setting up shop in the UK is more straightforward than doing the same thing in France.
- razakel 7y ago
  Yep. You could have a company incorporated and bank account set up all ready to trade by tomorrow lunchtime for about $50.
matthewmacleod 7y ago
I’d rather have regulated banks please.
- ieS7rpVU 7y ago
  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?
  - blackbrokkoli 7y ago
    I don't know, let me think. Ah, right, 2008!
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      Well you wouldn't be giving free money to an unregulated bank, right
    - WanderPanda 7y ago
      You obviously do not know how 2008 came about and what role state intervention played...
    - smabie 7y ago
      What, specifically, are you referring to?
      - blackbrokkoli 7y ago
        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.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    > 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.
madeofpalk 7y ago
Here's hoping!
dabeeeenster 7y ago
Which regulations?
xkemp 7y ago
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.
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  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.
lexs 7y ago
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...

mellosouls 7y ago

Depends on whether those regulations are socially useful or not. It's not a given that should be the next step.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
We were repeatedly told that wouldn't be the case before the referendum. It's hard to see the point of Brexit otherwise though.
- Retric 7y ago
  At least in the US more productive states like New York and California heavily subsidize less productive states like New Mexico. I think there was real fear that Brexit was required to avoid a similar situation developing in the EU.
  - CraigJPerry 7y ago
    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). At least that was my understanding of today.
    - lottin 7y ago
      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.
      - K0SM0S 7y ago
        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.
        Retric 7y ago
        EU budget is a “puddly” 150b/year. Still, with the vast difference in economic development it adds up to a 500+$ per person per year funding differences between several country’s. Which as you say is not going to change things dramatically in a given year, but it’s still meaningful over decades. Of note, England negotiated a rebate before joining. So, it’s a demonstrated issue for them.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    The big difference was we don't share a currency with the rest of the EU and were never likely to do so.
  - mensetmanusman 7y ago
    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.
- threeseed 7y ago
  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: https://www.sustainweb.org/news/feb18_US_foodpoisoning/ https://www.sustainweb.org/news/feb18_US_foodpoisoning/
  - briandear 7y ago
    https://fullfact.org/health/food-poisoning-US-UK/ https://fullfact.org/health/food-poisoning-US-UK/
    - three_seagrass 7y ago
      That fact check is only evaluating the very specific claim: >"One in six people in the US get food poisoning each year and one in 66 people in the UK get food poisoning each year." Saying that while correct, the two specific studies use different methodology and should not be used together in a sentence.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I suspect we won't see that because there has been too much publicity about it already. Workers rights are a different matter though.
parsimo2010 7y ago
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.
- Retric 7y ago
  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.
  - philpem 7y ago
    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.
- threeseed 7y ago
  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.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    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.

WilliamEdward 7y ago

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.

dagaci 7y ago
I would love to know what these unnecessary regulations are.

ahmedalsudani 7y ago

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.

n4r9 7y ago
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.
threeseed 7y ago
Actually that's now really how it works. 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.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Companies don't have to care about customs controls if their products pass the controls 95% of the time.

als0 7y ago

It was easier already. From what I hear setting up shop in the UK is more straightforward than doing the same thing in France.

razakel 7y ago
Yep. You could have a company incorporated and bank account set up all ready to trade by tomorrow lunchtime for about $50.

matthewmacleod 7y ago

I’d rather have regulated banks please.

ieS7rpVU 7y ago
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?
- blackbrokkoli 7y ago
  I don't know, let me think. Ah, right, 2008!
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    Well you wouldn't be giving free money to an unregulated bank, right
  - WanderPanda 7y ago
    You obviously do not know how 2008 came about and what role state intervention played...
  - smabie 7y ago
    What, specifically, are you referring to?
    - blackbrokkoli 7y ago
      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.
- JackFr 7y ago
  > 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.

madeofpalk 7y ago

Here's hoping!

dabeeeenster 7y ago

Which regulations?

xkemp 7y ago

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.

mensetmanusman 7y ago
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.

lexs 7y ago

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...