Brexit revolution will lead to a new dynamic future
IF it wasn’t already obvious why the EU has spent the past three years of Brexit negotiations desperately trying to keep Britain bound by its rules and regulations even long after we have left, they were spelled out by Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in an interview this week.
Brexit, she said, is a “wake-up call” for the EU. Remaining EU member states have to respond by “upping their game” and becoming “attractive, innovative, creative, a good place for research and education”.
The inference is that Europe is none of these things. And how true. Of the great technological breakthroughs, all the innovation in business and manufacturing over the past 20 years, remarkably few have come from Europe.
Think of the internet giants – the likes of Microsoft, Apple, and Google – that have transformed the way we live. They are all American. Now think of the economies that have grown the fastest in recent years: China, India, South Korea, Singapore.They are allAsian.
What has Europe contributed to the party? While other parts of the world have been innovating and growing, Europe has been regulating.
THE EU’s biggest contribution to the internet age has been the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which, for example, forces companies to keep asking whether we want to receive emails from them.
The GDPR is not necessarily a bad thing – we need rules as to how corporations and governments can collect our data and what they can do with it. But it is a sad reflection on Europe that it doesn’t have a single internet giant of its own.
The EU’s obsession with regulation is a big part of the problem. It works on what is called the “precautionary principle”, which tends to mean banning innovation unless it is absolutely sure it is safe – and that it won’t undermine your existing industries.
A prime example is genetically-modified (GM) foods. Two decades ago Britain was in a good position to take a lead in this technology, which has allowed crop yields to be increased while simultaneously decreasing the amount of fertilisers and pesticides used.
Yet our own GM industry was smothered at birth by EU rules that made it all but impossible to conduct trials.
The US, meanwhile, powered ahead.The irony is that we have ended up eating GM foods anyway because we import large quantities of soya and other crops grown in this way.
It isn’t always EU regulations that hamper British industries. Sometimes it is our own petty rules. The story of Professor John Goodenough makes me weep.Thirty-three years ago the distinguished materials scientist left Oxford, where he had been working, because he knew the university would soon force him to retire.
So instead, he set up a laboratory at the University of Texas where he continued his work into the development of lithium ion batteries, which now power everything from mobile phones to electric cars – work for which last year, at the age of 97, he became the oldest winner of the Nobel Prize. That could have been a British triumph, and spawned a UK industry making the batteries, but instead it became an American achievement.
Two weeks today we will escape from the EU’s regulatory orbit. Our challenge thereafter should be to help make Angela Merkel’s worst nightmare become a reality – by turning Britain into a more smartly-regulated, lightly-taxed economy that sucks in investment from around the world.
AND it doesn’t mean chucking out rules on food safety or allowing employers to run their factories like Victorian mills. What it does mean is ensuring health and safety rules really are targeted at that purpose – and are not dreamed up by lobbyists working on behalf of vested interests who want to stifle competition.
It means having employment laws that don’t stop people working even when they want to, and allow employers the flexibility to employ who they want. It also means having an international trade policy which ensures that our economy is open to the world.
All that fussing over the Irish border last year wasn’t so much about keeping the traffic moving between Newry and Dundalk – it was part of a scheme to try to trap Britain into EU rules for ever after.
Now that, thankfully, the backstop has gone, we can use Brexit to our full advantage.
Indeed, if we are not prepared to revolutionise our approach to taxation, trade and regulation in order to escape from the sclerotic economies of Europe and move a bit more towards the dynamism of the US and Asia, there will have been no point to Brexit at all.