Image: Sunset over chemical works, UK. Credit: Geograph, CC 2.0.Ask a leading Brexiteer what Brexit is actually for and they tend to extol the virtues of rolling back regulation to liberate UK businesses. Take Boris Johnson, for example, who set out in his Telegraph column My plan for a better Brexit that the “one size fits all EU model of regulation” had lost the equivalent of “about 7 percent of GDP” and sometimes appeared “expressly designed – and at the behest of continental competitors – to make life difficult for UK entrepreneurs and innovators.” Johnson concluded: “regulatory divergence [is] one of the key attractions of Brexit”, echoing the Institute of Economic Affairs’ controversial ‘Plan A+: Creating a prosperous post-Brexit UK’ report, which said that regulatory divergence was essential to “capture the Brexit Prize”.
But it’s often been wryly observed that if you ask a Brexit supporter to actually name an EU regulation they object to, they often struggle to do so.
A Rapporteur at the Council of Europe, Geraint Davies, asked Boris Johnson that very question. Davies reports that, “after complaining about bananas, [Johnson] named REACH” (REACH being the EU’s main chemicals related regulations, the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals rules).
