George Hannah
Well-Known Member
You've posted this 'promise' three times now and those are the only occasions I've ever heard of it! I suppose it's from stuff like this -
A summary
- We end the supremacy of EU law and the European Court. We will be able to kick out those who make our laws.
- Europe yes, EU no. We have a new UK-EU Treaty based on free trade and friendly cooperation. There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it. We will take back the power to negotiate our own trade deals.
- Third, we will have a new UK-EU trading relationship. There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it. The heart of what we all want is the continuation of tariff-free trade with minimal bureaucracy. Countries as far away as Australia have Mutual Recognition agreements with the EU that deal with complex customs (and other ‘non-tariff barrier’) issues. We will do the same.
What about the so-called ‘Single Market’? The ‘Single Market’ is almost universally misunderstood and is nowhere defined in the EU Treaties. It was created in the 1980s by Jacques Delors in order to impose qualified majority voting in a vast range of areas beyond international trade such as the free movement of people, how we build schools or aircraft carriers, and thousands of things like the energy requirements of hoovers and the maximum size of containers in which two people sell olive oil to each other in the Shetland Islands (five litres). The Foreign Office and CBI like to claim that the Single Market was about ‘free trade’ but this is historical nonsense. Delors’ goal was explicitly political - as he said, 'we’re not here just to make a Single Market, that doesn’t interest me, but to make a political union.'
The Single Market causes big problems. For example, the Clinical Trials Directive has hampered the testing of vital cancer drugs for years causing unnecessary deaths. Single Market rules add complexity, time, and billions to government procurement programmes. Economists have tried and failed for twenty years to identify clear general gains from the Single Market. Even the Commission’s own, obviously optimistic, figures show that the supposed gains for the UK are smaller than reasonable estimates of the regulatory costs. Most businesses have said for over a decade that the Single Market does more harm than good but this debate has been distorted by a small number of large multinationals that lobby Brussels to use regulations to crush entrepreneurial competition. Big businesses are often the enemy of the public interest.
These problems will grow. The next EU Treaty is intended to harmonise another vast range of things including areas such as company law and ‘property rights’. Harmonising regulations is often good for countries like Greece but is often disastrous for Britain which wins more of the world’s investment in Europe than any other European country precisely because much of our legal system is not yet harmonised with Europe.
The EU’s supporters say ‘we must have access to the Single Market’. Britain will have access to the Single Market after we vote leave. British businesses that want to sell to the EU will obey EU rules just as American, Swiss, or Chinese businesses do. Only about one in twenty British businesses export to the EU but every business is subject to every EU law. There is no need for Britain to impose all EU rules on all UK businesses as we do now, any more than Australia or Canada or India imposes all EU rules on their businesses. British businesses that wish to follow Single Market rules should be able to without creating obligations on everybody else to follow them. The vast majority of British businesses that do not sell to the EU will benefit from the much greater flexibility we will have.
The idea that our trade will suffer because we stop imposing terrible rules such as the Clinical Trial Directive is silly. The idea that ‘access to the Single Market’ is a binary condition and one must accept all Single Market rules is already nonsense - the Schengen system is ‘Single Market’ and we are not part of that. After we vote to leave, we will expand the number of damaging Single Market rules that we no longer impose and we will behave like the vast majority of countries around the world, trading with the EU but, crucially, without accepting the supremacy of EU law.
Regulatory diversity is good in many ways. One of the great advantages of post-Renaissance Europe over China was regulatory diversity. This meant Europe experimented and reinforced success (which often meant copying Britain) while China stagnated. Hamilton’s competitive federalism between the different states in America brought similar gains. Now the EU’s 1950s bureaucratic centralism, reinforced by the Charter of Fundamental Rights that gives the European Court greater power over EU members than the Supreme Court has over US states, increasingly mimics 16th century China in preventing experiments and crushing diversity.
- We spend our money on our priorities. Instead of sending £350 million per week to Brussels, we will spend it on our priorities like the NHS and schools.
- We take back control of migration policy, including the 1951 UN Convention on refugees, so we have a fairer and more humane policy, and we decide who comes into our country, on what terms, and who is removed.
- We will regain our seat on international bodies where Brussels represents us, and use our greater international influence to push for greater international cooperation.
- We will build a new European institutional architecture that enables all countries, whether in or out of the EU or euro, to trade freely and cooperate in a friendly way.
- We will negotiate a new UK-EU Treaty and end the legal supremacy of EU law and the European Court before the 2020 election.
- We do not necessarily have to use Article 50 - we may agree with the EU another path that is in both our interests.
- Given that all the big issues have already been solved over the years between the EU and countries around the world, and there is already a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to the Russian border, the new UK-EU Treaty should be ready within two years. In many areas we will continue existing arrangements at least for a while. Obviously the relationship will change and improve over time but a main goal for the first phase is to avoid unnecessary disruption. All the important elements of a new Treaty should be in place well before the next election.
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