The UK still doesn’t have a clear plan for life after the EU – so how do we make Brexit a success?

What Britain urgently needs but acutely lacks is a coherent post-Brexit regulatory strategy, says Anton Spisak. And this is what it should focus on

(AFP via Getty Images)

When Britain negotiated its trade agreement with the EU, it put regulatory sovereignty on a pedestal. It argued that what mattered above all else was the principle of being able to diverge from EU rules, not what that ability would be used for. To suggest that exercising the right to diverge would cost us future access to the EU market and lead to a new barrier in the Irish Sea was to be accused of missing the bigger picture.

Five months after its departure from the single market, there is little more clarity about what Britain should do with its newfound freedoms. True, the government has put forward proposals for the freeports, announced triumphantly as the prize of new autonomy even though they had been possible from within the EU. More recently, at the Queen’s Speech, there have been new announcements for reforms of subsidy rules, procurement and animal welfare standards.

Ask around Whitehall if there is more to the Brexit dividend, and you will hear the mutterings of a return to a “looser”, “common-law based” regulatory philosophy that had once distinguished Britain from the “over-prescriptive” approach of European neighbours. Prompt them further: how will Britain exercise its new regulatory powers when economic interests for businesses dictate voluntarily following EU rules; how constrained are its choices with Northern Ireland bound to many EU regulations; what happens when Edinburgh and Cardiff follow future EU laws but we diverge from them; and how much public appetite there is for shifting to looser regulation? All there is in response is complete silence.