Brexit Ten Years On (part 2)
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Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. It is ten years since the Brexit referendum. I'm Alex Forsyth, a BBC correspondent who's covered Brexit from both Brussels and Westminster. A decade after the decision to leave the EU, what impact has it had on various aspects of public and political life? This isn't an exhaustive examination, but it is an attempt to understand some of the consequences of Brexit ten years on.
The British people have voted to leave the European Union...
Let June the 23rd go down in our history as our Independence Day.
The UK result leaves me deeply disappointed and profoundly concerned. Brexit means Brexit.
We're going to get Brexit done. I'm sorry. We will miss you.
Claims of a ban on bendy bananas came to symbolise what many Brexiteers saw as a fundamental problem with the EU. Burdensome bureaucracy, an onerous regulation that stifled UK business and innovation. The Brexit campaign lent heavily on the notion that reclaiming sovereignty, ditching so-called red tape imposed by Brussels and setting its own rules would unleash the UK's potential. So in reality, what has happened so far? I asked Jill Rutter, senior fellow at the Institute for Government, and Joel Relon, a senior researcher at UK in a Changing Europe, to explain how the UK has used its post-Brexit regulatory freedom.
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.
That Boris Johnson moment, I think, was when he launched the Vote Leave bus and he was talking about there's a limit on how powerful your vacuum cleaner can be. Jill, do you remember through the campaign, did you get a sense of the specifics of what the arguments were for why this might be of benefit?
No, there weren't really specifics there, but you have to remember that the dislike of EU regulation goes a long way back. If you remember back to Mrs Thatcher's speech in Bruges back in 1989, she talked about we haven't just rolled back the frontiers of the state in the UK to have them reimposed from Brussels. And successive governments, both Conservative and Labour, really didn't like some of the regulation coming out of Brussels. They didn't like the fact that the EU European Court of Justice might, after action by the European Commission, find that the UK hadn't implemented EU rules properly, might fine the UK. And I think there was a feeling, two sets of feelings. One, that the EU did far too much regulation.
It was far too burdensome. But secondly, also, that quite often the UK was the only country that really followed the laws.
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