This was all part of the pre-referendum Brexit narrative driven by various think tanks with the help of the media, that there was any number of massively damaging EU rules that industry was desperate to shake off. There wasn't and never will be, which is the reason for the government's difficulties.
The Open Europe think tank once claimed this country could save £33 billion a year or £600 million a week by scrapping the top 100 (ranked by cost of implementation) of these burdensome directives and regulations. This figure was taken and used by Boris Johnson in various impromptu speeches during the campaign and in a Telegraph article of May 2026.
Open Europe has long gone, it fused with Policy Exchange in 2020. However, the best-known pro-Brexit free market think tank is the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) which has much the same agenda. They often have members of staff on the television spouting all kinds of stuff and are widely believed to be behind the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget disaster.
Now their Head of Public Policy, Matthew Lesh, has a piece on CityAM lamenting the fact that the government (led by a Brexiteer) is ‘squandering’ post-Brexit opportunities to deregulate.
However, tellingly he doesn’t mention any of the top 100 identified by Open Europe. No, they don’t get a look in. Instead, he claims that there are “plenty of potential beneficial changes; it’s just that these are often relatively small or industry-specific and unlikely to make headlines.”
We have gone from big expensive-to-implement regulations to trivial things which, “taken separately, have little impact" but if all added together "will add up to a lot.” The feast of regulations ready for ditching turns out to be a few crumbs.
Mmmmm…. And I wonder if that’s true anyway? Somehow I doubt it.
The one example he has his sight on is …wait for it, Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 known as the Open Internet Access Regulation which came into force in 2016.
Now I don’t know about you but (a) I have never heard of it and (b) I never heard anyone complain about it, certainly not during or after the referendum campaign. Not once in the last six years has anybody even mentioned it, not even John Longworth, well known for digging up obscure EU regulations - even non-existent ones - which he claims have held Britain back.
I don’t know if it’s had any impact either way or if internet providers find it hard to comply or somehow lose out by having to offer equal access to all internet users or if it’s “unnecessary and damaging to innovation” as Lesh suggests it is.
He claims the regulation makes it, "difficult to prioritise data-intensive time-sensitive applications, such as hazard and collision information to self-driving cars or special services for the metaverse.”
The UK doesn’t have the fastest broadband in Europe anyway so I’m not sure data-intensive rollout is affected by the EU regulation more than the slow roll out of full-fibre. We’re out in the sticks and have never had more than 10 Mbps and often it was down to less than 2.
What the article does tell me is that Brexit supporters are struggling to find anything they can point to by way of deregulation that is going to be of the slightest use to British industry. The bottom of the barrel is being well and truly scraped.
The fact that it comes from the IEA is also instructive. If this is the best they can come up with, it's probably best to give up now.
The CityAM piece opens by asking: “Is Brexit a proven failure?” I think Mr. Lesh is becoming worried about the lack of progress in even identifying any moderately onerous EU laws. He goes on:
“Remainers latching onto the associated costs of leaving the customs bloc certainly think so. Some recent polls even indicate a majority for rejoining the European Union. Meanwhile, evidence of the benefits of taking back control appears scant. The government delivered a faster vaccine programme, signed trade deals, and talked the big talk about taking advantage of our newfound freedoms.”
Scant is a good word. But perhaps it doesn't convey the total absence of anything that think tanks, and latterly civil servants, after years of trying have been able to uncover anything in the EU acquis communitaire that is unnecessary, undesirable, or excessively burdensome.
This is not to say everything is rosy because it probably isn't. But if regulation is needed there is little point in creating ones that are slightly different to your neighbours when with a little compromise on your part, the market for your exporters can be expanded 6 or 7 fold.
I think we're not far from the point where even men like Matthew Lesh and the IEA will have to admit remainers were right all along.
