EU regulations: curse or boon?
Exchange of the week
To The Independent
Theresa May is full of good intentions, but has no understanding of Europe. It is a large, homogeneous trading bloc that has set out to protect its citizens by establishing a level playing field with high standards for product safety and employee rights. It will happily enter into an agreement with the UK that maintains that playing field. Any agreement will have to be enforced by a judicial system that accepts those standards. The EU is not being difficult when it insists on this.
The US is different: it is a trading bloc that protects its businesses. Any agreement with the US will have to give US businesses the right to do things their way.
Where the UK political parties have failed is in not recognising that Europe is protective of its citizens; and by and large, its standards are the ones we should aspire to, not object to merely because we are only a bit player in developing them. Jon Hawksley
To The Daily Telegraph
There seems to be an obsession, on both sides of the Brexit argument, about bureaucratic minutiae. How about someone highlighting the major faults of the present system?
Many people do not realise that we pay too much for some basic imports because of the EU’S common external tariff (CET). Average tariff rates charged on cereals like wheat and barley are 19.5%. Clothing is at an average of 11.5%. The prices of these goods hit poorer families particularly hard because they form an important part of their purchases. Surely Jeremy Corbyn would not wish to damage (possibly permanently) what must be a large part of his constituency?
The CET also punishes countries outside the tariff wall, since the price of their products is raised as soon as they reach Europe. And yet the best way we can help the development of countries outside the EU, some of them the poorest in the world, is by opening up to trade with them. This is better than all our overseas aid, which usually has no good effect on the productive capacity of the countries being targeted. Professor Arthur Morris, Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire