Davis is making the third speech in the road to Brexit series in Austria today. The British government has a touching faith in speeches as if they are equivalent to a legal agreement. This would be the case if the speeches actually said anything and contained firm details rather than platitudes, aspiration, blather and hot air. Unfortunately, the road to Brexit series does not. I am afraid the EU will not be impressed.
He is apparently going to tell us that fears we are going to deregulate ourselves into a dystopian Mad Max world is "based on nothing". Nothing that is except speeches by government ministers like Priti Patel or Phillip Hammond. It's a case of my speeches good, their speeches bad.
He is going to say, according to the BBC (HERE) in trailed reports of the speech, that we will in many cases be seeking higher standards than those set by the EU.
The Guardian (HERE) carries similar reports. They say Davis, in his speech, will tell us the UK government "wants to oversee a race to the top in global standards, listing workers’ rights, City regulation, animal welfare and the environment as areas for potential improvement"
He doesn't explain why we have to leave the EU to impose higher standards on ourselves. The EU only sets minimum ones, any country is free to impose higher environmental and labour standards if we want to. It is madness. I had relatives who said it was these damned EU regulations that we needed to get rid of. To learn that we are going to have more and even higher standards will be a bit of a blow! And we thought when BoJo told us last week the UK couldn't accept those "intolerable" EU regulations after Brexit that he wanted to scrap them. No, he wants to add more and better ones because the EU's are too low! If this is true we should have no problem accepting EU rules and regulations as a minimum standard - easily written into UK law and a free trade agreement I would have thought. But don't hold your breath.
The Guardian claims our intrepid international trade secretary, Liam Fox, will also stress the benefits of high standards in a speech to the manufacturing industry on Tuesday, calling UK-produced goods “a kitemark of quality, innovation and world-leading technological advances”. Fox will tell business leaders at an EEF conference that there will be a “functioning trade regime on day one” after Brexit. I worry that he actually believes this stuff. What an awakening he has in store.
The Telegraph (HERE) hits back by criticising the EU for saying British workers will be at greater risk of cancer by diluting health and safety laws in an attempt to “lower production costs”, which would result in “higher exposure to chemicals and carcinogens”.
The BBC, who have probably seen the speech suggest Davis will say, "Neither side should "put up unnecessary barriers", citing the example of a car made in Austria only needing one set of regulatory checks that are then accepted across the EU. He doesn't yet grasp that no one is putting up unnecessary barriers we are simply putting ourselves outside the ones that already exist.
He will say, "That's exactly the sort of arrangement we want to see maintained even after we leave the European Union". This is still have cake and eat it stuff. We want to be out but have all the advantages of free trade that being in confers.
The BBC point out that the EU has previously said the UK will not be able to adopt its own standards and regulations and expect them to be recognised across Europe. Last year EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said: "The UK wants to take back control, it wants to adopt its own standards and regulations. But it also wants to have these standards recognised automatically in the EU. That is what UK papers ask for. This is simply impossible. You cannot be outside the single market and shape its legal order."
Poor old Davis. He is watching his own dreams being broken on the reality anvil. Belatedly, he is realising that we cannot have our cake and eat it. We can't be outside the single market and trade with it as we do now. He bangs on about mutual recognition of each other standards. The EU is about seven times bigger than we are. It is a legal and regulatory juggernaut. It is not going to recognise our standards when we diverge in the future. This would be unthinkable. More likely we will adopt their standards.
At the very least there will need to be a joint body to discuss and agree those standards and a means of ensuring the standards are met. Pretty soon you are talking about something that looks remarkably like the EU. They will not do this and will say the UK cannot influence the EU's legal order from outside and we will either have to accept EU standards or create our own and run two sets, one the EU exports and the other for domestic use.
As I write I am listening to a report on BBC radio 4 about Michael Gove and the new "green" agricultural policy and hearing a farmer tell us that British food is "the best in the world". It strikes me that this is how we do things here. We spend most of our time looking back nostalgically about how good things were in the past or dreaming about how good things will be in the future. The present however, is always dystopian. In fact when I think about it this is how politics works.
Shankar Singham of the shadowy, right wing think tank (was there ever a greater misnomer?) The Legatum Institute, was on the same BBC radio programme, trying to say two diametrically opposed things at once, that we could have higher standards but lower regulation in some areas where EU rules favoured local suppliers over British ones. Pressed on this, he couldn't come up with a single example. He assured us that a FTA between the UK and the EU would have a chapter on divergence.
If so it will be unique and if there is such a chapter it will be a short one - there will not be divergence. Or there will not be a FTA.
