Joel Relon

I think there was this idea that regulation was central to the EU referendum campaign because of that famous slogan, take back control, which speaks to the idea that the EU is stopping us from doing things the way we would like to do them.

But in the campaign itself, there was actually very little detailed discussion of what taking back control would mean or the types of EU regulations that you might want to get rid of.

There was maybe mention of rules around data protection, working hours, but really not very much more than that.

It really happened at a much more emotive level where Boris Johnson, Michael Gove were saying,

We should not let the EU tell us what to do.

They shouldn't set the rules on our vacuum cleaners and how powerful they can be.

But there wasn't getting into the real weeds of it.

And that really speaks to, I think, the problems which then came further down the line.

There was this idea we don't like EU regulation.

It's suppressing British businesses.

It's set in Brussels.

It's not done in our interests.

But what you want to replace it with, that was never, ever really discussed until long after the fact.

The central kind of essay question for this project was, well, now we've taken back control, what on earth are we going to do with it?

What are we going to change?

And actually, we've not diverged very much at all.

And the kind of most fundamental reason for that is this idea that Brexit was premised on that we can tailor regulation to the UK, better suit it to our own interests.

is a contradiction in terms really because from a trading perspective regulation is not about tailoring it's about compromise it's about creating commonly agreed rules which mean i can change with you can trade with the person next to you and we all work to the same standards and that makes life easier if you do things your own way that might work for your specific markets but it doesn't work for anybody else around the world and so what you find is that there are actually more barriers to trade business doesn't like that and so it meant the government time and time again

Actually, after it proposed something, pulled back and said, oh, this isn't going to work.

It's going to make life harder for our businesses, for our economy.