Brexit: life after Brussels

By Pete North - February 13, 2021

This week I’ve been sounding more and more like the sort of belligerent Brexiteer I’ve railed against for the last half decade. It’s no damascene conversion. It’s just that I can read the writing on the wall. Though the EU is amenable to improving the implementation of the TCA, we’re not going to see any radical changes where exporters face official controls at the borders. We can get the customs operation running like clockwork, but that doesn’t make the regulatory stipulations any less of a deterrent to trade.

This is something soft leavers saw coming but the Ultras dismissed third country controls as “a few extra forms”. They’re now finding out the hard way what that means in the real world. If exporters can adapt and stay in the game then great, but a great many will simply have to rethink exporting to the EU. I do not see that there is very much we can do in the interim to change that and by the time we get around to fixing it, it will be too late.

With that in mind we might as well go the whole hog. For right or wrong, we’re are committed to it now so there’s not sense in doing anything by halves.

Pretty much from the outset I’ve argued against divergence on standards, pointing out the futility of establishing our own regime and pointed out the utility of harmonisation, but that argument only goes so far. It doesn’t speak to the volumes of EU rules that have no bearing on exports and should never have been harmonised in the first place. It was done for political reasons and was never in the public interest.

In this, the TCA goes to some lengths to ensure we maintain alignment with Brussels, but nothing here is set in stone the way it would be in the EEA. We can diverge if we’re willing to absorb the commensurate tariff penalty. Though some see that as blanket deterrence, there’s no reason why it should be. If exporters are already excluded by way of non-tariff barriers, the only reason to stay aligned is if there is hope of reaching equivalence deals.

On matters such as aviation and aerospace, and perhaps financial services, something will eventually be worked out, but in other areas we might as well let rip and let Brussels do their worst. On matters of waste disposal and landfill, energy, water, habitats, food safety and labour rights, there’s no good reason not to go to town with a red pen.

Usually government red tape initiatives fall flat and are rightly met with weary scepticism but those of us who’ve seen it all before with every new government attempting to cement their business credentials. The tendency is for these such initiatives to be quietly dropped when no radical improvements are identified. The Tory assumption is that regulation is just pettifogging red tape, but they get a lot of pushback from business. That then leaves them fiddling around the edges which isn’t worth the headache.

These, though, are not normal times. There is a need to rethink a whole raft of regulation. Labour rights and rules on health and safety in the workplace become instantly obsolete once the penny drops that home working is here to stay. Businesses who’ve stayed in operation during the lockdown have no intention of going back to running a fully staffed headquarters with all the bureaucracy, red tape and overheads that entails.

This gets me thinking about the time I worked for HBOS in Halifax. I was the systems developer for the estate security department. Though HBOS had its own imposing HQ at the top of town, a great many HBOS offices occupied the floors above shops all over town, each with their own access control systems controlled by a server in the basement of the HQ. One of the functions of the department was to manage the allocation of parking spaces within the town. A third of all business hours parking spaces in Halifax are leased (at considerable expense) from the council by HBOS.

With ever more council initiatives to cut down congestion and reduce the externalities, each year the quotas would be squeezed (partly because of EU rules), meaning parking spaces were rationed – so we had a piece of software where you could fill in a form to apply for a parking spot that would take account of your seniority, years of service, special needs, and distance from home. Even if you had a high score, you were still on a waiting list and this system needed two full time parking coordinators and the support of a software developer such as I. The department had to issue permits and deal with the council and have all the intensely political arguments with management.

I’ve encountered this with Atkins Global at Wetherby too. For a time there was danger of me finding a software specialism in parking space allocation for corporates. This became even more onerous when planning rules limited the number of parking spaces for new office developments on the assumption that people would simply catch the bus instead. That was a crap idea being that people we driving in from as far away as Bradford, Leeds and Harrogate. This saw people parking either on the access roads inside the business park or over in the Sainsbury’s car park – the great annoyance of Sainsburys.

In order to solve this they attempted an incentive scheme to promote ride sharing – which lasted all of a month, not least because it then had insurance implications. Also, it’s a bad idea and it doesn’t work. In each case, the facilities departments had to employ security firms and parking inspectors, and an army of support staff just to deal with the fact that people drive into work.

Home working is then a game changer. HBOS gets to dump satellite properties it doesn’t want, councils get their traffic reduction, parking politics is a thing of the past and workers get an extra hour in bed and no commuting costs. Nobody is in a rush to get back to the old normal because it was horrifying.

This going to transform cities and towns. Places like Halifax will never be the same again. I always thought that spaces above town centre retail should be appropriated by schools and universities turning town centres into education campuses interwoven with business and retail. There are any number of ways we can repurpose towns. I quite like the idea of city parks, bulldozing shopping centres that will never be revived.

If we’re going to rethink how we do things, then we also need to re-regulate. Environmental and social regulations along with planning need a complete overhaul, as to labour laws – taking into account the impact of work-life balance, digital surveillance of workers, safety in the home and childcare provisions. This is where we want the right rules for the job rather than rules that fit the EU’s competition policy.

If we’re going for Net Zero, then we can’t re-start the nightmare of daily commuting, but then if business is no longer confined to recruiting in the locality, we’re going to need rules to ensure jobs are protected and there are incentives to keep jobs based in the UK.

While we’re at it, since there’s an exodus from the cities, we’re going to have to build new homes in greener places – and we must takes steps to ensure they stay green – looking at integrated CHP plants and micronuclear energy. We’re going to have to rethink transport and water policy. For every EU directive that has ever been adopted, we’re going to have to remove the bureaucratic barriers to doing what we must. There is little utility in harmonisation with Europe and this is where agility is more valuable than uniformity.

The EU trade debate is happening as though Covid never happened and that there is an old normal tor return to when in fact we’re at a new 1945 where things simply cannot remain the same and we need to rebuild the country according to a new vision.

The utopian ideal of a European superstrate is long dead, and we have no need of the old rules designed to bring about “ever closer union”. It has always been a greater burden for the UK to reshape our public services and utilities to the continental model in order to create an EU wide market in services. We could take this opportunity to overhaul our public procurement rules and visa system to serve our own ambitions rather than the utopian EU ideal.

There’s in point in trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Brussels is a dead end for Britain and it clearly isn’t interested in trade unless we acquiesce to maintaining its clunky rules and regulations – right at the time when we need to be innovating in policy and letting go of the baggage of the last century.

Common regulation means things only move as fast as the slowest ship in the convoy. This at a time when we need effects based policy more concerned with tangible results than meeting EU recycling and habitats quotas. The amount of government bandwidth and money devoted to chasing targets is staggering. That must change.

Regulatory divergence is not akin with lowering standards, nor are EU rules and regulatory systems the highest available. Very often they’re compromises and the result of EU wide protectionist corporate lobbying. By breaking away, getting a head starts on “building back better” we put ourselves in the frame to lead on new standards.

The lack of a comprehensive and functioning trade relationship is most certainly going to prove an obstacle, and our exports are most certainly going to take a pasting, but for the moment it doesn’t look like there is anything we can do about it. We must then look at what we can do instead and pursue those avenues as quickly as possible. That means major reinvestment in the UK, taking the fullest advantage of our regulatory sovereignty. If the EU wants to punish us for that, let them. We’ll live.

I can’t be bothered with recriminations over how it should have played out nor do I see any point in trying to put things back how they were, not least when things weren’t working even before Covid. Though there’s every reason to stick to the baseline standards on food, chemicals and consumables (as per the TCA), Brexit was ultimately about making our own laws to suit the needs of our own people, according to our own values and ambitions, rather than the construction of a Euro-utopia.

That’s the school of thought that ultimately won the Brexit wars – so now we have two choices. We can either keep fighting the same old tiresome battles or we can accept the new order of things, and move forward with rebuilding the country. We can always revisit the EU trade question later but for now, we have matters close to home to think about. Let’s be done with the pessimism and fighting over things we can’t change and start thinking about the things we can change.

We have no shortage of things that need fixing. The court system is a mess, immigration is broken, our public health system is decrepit, public procurement is a mess, our energy grid is in chaos and our home building is virtually non-existent. With substantially fewer obstacles in the way, there is now no excuse. You can’t run a country on the basis of “what will the neighbours think?”. Let’s get on with liberating Britain from the dead hand of Brussels bureaucracy.