Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Playing by our own rules a losing game
Iwas at a party last week in a private members’ club decorated like a Victorian brothel. This turned out to be appropriate because an excitable Whitehall bigwig was telling me how he’s shafting EU rules.
He was obeying orders from boss Boris Johnson whose message to the EU is: “No surrender.” The PM thinks it’ll be spiffingly popular to reject all EU regulations. This official’s job was to write new ones.
But this may not go down quite as well with the voters as Johnson imagines.
Polls show that seven in 10 want to retain the ban on mobile roaming charges and expensive phone calls from foreign hotspots.
That’s an EU regulation. So is compensation for flight delays which 80 per cent want to keep. They like EU regs which stop dodgy vacuum cleaners being sold, let them bathe in clean seawater, eat Cornish pasties only from Cornwall and Stilton cheese produced solely in Derbyshire, Leicestershire or Nottinghamshire. Though, I grant you, that’s hard cheese on the
Cambridgeshire village of Stilton forbidden from selling it.
But as polling guru Sir John Curtice notes: “There really isn’t much appetite for deregulation.”
This is not about returning to the battlements to fight a war against Brexit which is now lost. It’s about winning peace, and getting the best out of our new trade arrangements.
Sajid Javid says everything will be hunky-dory because the Japanese manage to sell cars to the EU from British factories.
The Chancellor fails to mention they comply with EU standards to do so. The social scientists aboard the independent and impartial UK in a Changing Europe research group say our motor manufacturers will produce 175,000 fewer cars a year if they are hit with 10 per cent tariffs.
Which they will under Johnson’s proposed Aussie-EU trade proposal which nudges dangerously close to No Deal. That’s massive job losses in the Midlands and the North.
Jaguar Land Rover boss Ralf Speth says he needs 20 million just in time parts each day, and the less alignment between Britain and Europe, the more border checks will be introduced to stop him getting them.
That’s why he shut production lines at his four UK plants for our scheduled departure dates in April and October last year.
Nor are people quite so fussed about immigration as they were when they gave Brexit the go-ahead, which is just as well as it will only fall by around 35,000 when free movement ends. Perhaps the realisation that the NHS relies on 66,000 EU migrants helps. Which is 6,000 more than at the 2016 referendum.
Rejecting EU regs may not go down well with voters