Christopher Booker writes a regular column in The Telegraph on various topics. He's a leaver but believes in the EFTA/EEA option and thinks the government is making a complete pig's ear of Brexit. Part of his column this week was about BoJo's speech and his talk of scrapping all those "intolerable" EU regulations. If you didn't see it, here it is:
Boris Johnson’s Brexit rallying cry last week left some of us wondering, not for the first time, whether he has quite the secure grasp on reality we expect from a Foreign Secretary. As he enthused about Britain “going global”, he looked forward to the day when we can start scrapping all those “intolerable” EU regulations.
But as I noted in 2013, under the heading “Forget Brussels – now we are ruled by the giants of Geneva”, what no UK politicians seem to have noticed is the revolution whereby so much EU regulation originates from global bodies even higher than Brussels, which merely passes it on.
The European Free Trade Association had just reported that “more than 90 per cent” of the EU’s single market rules now came from UN and other global bodies, such as the OECD, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, all of which had to be faithfully transcribed into EU law.
So what Boris will discover is that “going global” will mean that we still have to obey almost all those same global regulations. In the trade it’s called “the double coffin lid”. You escape from one coffin, only to discover there’s another one even bigger outside it.
The cost of making the discovery that we will still be bound to comply with all these "intolerable" rules will be incalculable. At least we will be able to say we told you so.
