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To: Winniesboy

Thanks for the explanation.

What do you think of the overall thesis, that Brexit is going to cost more than the past many years of EU membership, according to Bloomberg?


51 posted on 01/17/2020 9:28:57 AM PST by Albion Wilde (It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it. --Douglas MacArthur)
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To: Albion Wilde; Cronos
Impossible to know - there's no remotely comparable precedent for Brexit, so predicting its results, whether negative or positive, is a mug's game, and I'm no good at predictions anyway.

Incidentally, the other point you made in passing - about the proportion of UK law deriving from the EU, is also, I'm afraid, a gross distortion. For a start, it's based only on the enumeration of new law introduced over the period of British membership, not the corpus of statute and common law accumulated over the centuries; and it counts every detailed technical regulation as a 'law' equivalent to an Act of Parliament. The EU laws/regulations are in any case confined to a few specific industries (mostly agriculture and fisheries). This is a good fact-checking summary of the allegation:

UK Law: What Proportion influenced by EU?"

It's salutary sometimes to think of the areas of British life unaffected by EU law. In no particular order, education, health and social security, policing, defence, the legal system, the criminal law, the construction industry, transport infrastructure, taxation other than VAT, power and water supply, the structure of local and national government and electoral system, the arts, sport, the currency - that's just a start off the top of my head, there are many more. In all these sectors there's a lot of cooperation and liaison with the equivalents in other EU member states, but not because of a common subjection to EU law. Agriculture and fisheries are the big exceptions: Ted Heath signed up to these when they were already in place, on joining the EC in 1973.

Even where there is EU law, it's always there because a British government at the time of its introduction has assented to it and declined to veto or require a derogation. More than that, in many cases the UK has been active in the development of a EU law or has even originated something which the EU has subsequently taken up (animal health regulations are an example of an area where the UK has taken the lead). The widespread belief that the UK is somehow the passive victim of something over which it has no control or influence is a myth. (Here's a nice observation on that point from a relatively neutral observer - an Irish diplomat who represented his country at the EU for many years, and saw at close quarters how the UK operates in EU decision-making:

I saw how great Britain's influence was )

52 posted on 01/18/2020 1:47:26 AM PST by Winniesboy
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