An interesting list which is difficult, if not impossible, to tackle in one post. Maybe that is why it was drawn up, alongside the obvious Pythonesque parallel. I take umbrage with the notion that the EU have given us ‘improved animal welfare in food production’. You can duck out (no pun intended) of a whole lot of that if you pass your meat off as Halal, and animal welfare is better and more stringently regulated in the UK than in the EU as a whole. For all that Danish Bacon is viewed as a beacon of quality, the pigs there get a pretty rough time of it.
Things such as ‘no paperwork or customs for exports throughout the single market’ are demonstrably not true. Lead free petrol, restrictions on landfill dumping and cheaper mobile charges would have happened anyway. In the case of mobile phones the technology is there already, has improved and become cheaper over time. I would be surprised if, given what we now know about the long lifespans of materials traditionally dumped in landfills, we wouldn’t have come up with some landfill regulation independently. The heavy contamination of Times Beach, Missouri and the Love Canal neighbourhood in Niagara Falls shocked people into taking action against dumping. Likewise once the health implications of leaded petrol (and smoking in the workplace) became apparent then action would have been taken eventually.
I’m not especially pro-Brexit. I wish they would get on with it, but it is playing out in the manner in which I thought it probably would; slowly and so mired and bogged down that it might not even look like Brexit when it is all over, if it is ever over.
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