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An interesting point I’d not realised

As and when it’s possible that we might be allowed to trade freely with the EU because we’re good little boys there’s an incentive to be good little boys. Sign up to their rules because, well, incentives, see?

But if, whatever we do, ew don;t get the sweeties then why in buggery play by their rules? Why not just let rip?

Now that we are out of the EU, and with no realistic prospect of the UK ever being granted access to the single market in financial services, the best move we could make would be to repeal all of it in one clean sweep.

They’re talking about MIFID II there but this applies to everything.

You’re going to continue pissing about with sausages into Ulster? Fine, OK, fuck you. We’re repealing MIFID II, Reach, COP thisnthat, CE markings, restrictions on vacuum cleaner engine size and all the rest of the 40 year accretions of nonsense.

Byeeeee!

11 thoughts on “An interesting point I’d not realised”

  1. Don’t suppose it would be as easy as that. Most of these regulations have come about because interest groups have lobbied for them & have been benefiting from them. They’re not going to give in quietly

  2. “…. and all the rest of the 40 year accretions of nonsense”

    Isn’t that Boris’s plan?

    Should be a significant business advantage in world markets and who cares about the EU and their funny ways?

  3. Are you broadcasting from another dimension Tim? Because the scum of the British State aren’t going to release ANY of the their tinpot “legal” powers. They are brazenly grabbing for tyranny never mind getting rid of it.

  4. The latest caper is to weaken Judicial Reviews so that all they can do is get a promise that the fucking state will do something about the bad law sometime instead of the law being struck down as now. And BiS to the side all of this is a worldwide plan. Not at a micro-level perhaps but all the world’s political shite deciding to move to just about end freedom at the same time is not a co-incidence.

  5. The regulators have a vested interest in regulation. Nothing will be repealed. Laws will be made tighter to ensure public safety. Careers are not made by pushing against the status quo but by following trends and the trends are illiberal.

  6. We need to be selective. Things like CE markings most certainly should not be scrapped. The alternative is that each market has its own standards, which is very bad for exporters (they have the expense of more certifications) and ver bad for importers (they cannot import goods unless they are certified to our own parochial standard).

    The risk with international standards is that they get subverted by non-technical people to add unnecessary restrictions. That is addressed by being part of the standards-making body. One of the reasons why Brexit was so stupid.

    @Andrew Again: “Nothing will be repealed” – That’s not what history tells us. We used to have lots and lots of standards – different for each country – and they got unified so that one sufficed across the EU and other countries which agreed to go along with it. Your mobile phone works in pretty much all countries in the world due to a combination of two factors: GSM standards being adopted by Europe and many other countries, and monufacturers then making phones which implemented the few different standards remaining. The USA used to have different standards, but even they were not able to justify an incompatible system as so a phone now works everywhere, which is a huge advantage to consumers, importers, exporter, and network operators.

  7. All the stuff from China has CE, UL and other national standard markings. Whether they mean anything is another matter. As long as we don’t mandate measurements in barleycorns we should be ok.

    I pine for the old cable colours but I know they’ll never return.

  8. Bloke in North Dorset

    We need to be selective. Things like CE markings most certainly should not be scrapped. The alternative is that each market has its own standards, which is very bad for exporters (they have the expense of more certifications) and ver bad for importers (they cannot import goods unless they are certified to our own parochial standard).

    Not strictly true. It might be easier if we have common standards but the main point is that a country’s standards should be open and the method of changing them transparent and considered. Of course they can, and have been, used to create national champions but that’s a conspiracy against consumers.

    A case in point (a half remembered story but I’m sure someone will remember the detail) – in the late ’70s and ’80s American car manufacturers complained that they weren’t being given access to Japanese car markets and were being killed at home by Japanese exports. Leaving aside the quality issue the Japanese did have a closed market. When they agreed to open up a US manufacturer sent a a ship full of cars to Japan.

    When the ship arrived inspectors set to work measuring the cars and informed the Americans that they didn’t conform to their new standards (something to do with brake lights IIRC). Japanese manufacturers had obviously been told about the change (probably pushed for it or something similar) so all the cars had to go back.

    As to GSM (Groupe Spécial Mobile) that was/is a unique situation. Mobile phones were starting to be commoditised in the US and Europe but the technologies in use couldn’t easily be scaled up. If mobile phones were ever going to be a consumer item in Europe (note in this case I don’t mean EU) then some coordination was going to be needed to ensure a big enough market for handset manufacturers to get the scale needed to bring prices down.

    This meant that spectrum had to be allocated and coordinated as spectrum was a national competence in and manufacturers needed all countries in Europe to allocate the same spectrum to get manufacturing scale.

    Furthermore, radio signals don’t respect national boundaries and controlling them at those boundaries is hard. So its better that there is one band across the whole continent so that its easier for MNOs to coordinate.

    Spectrum is also a scarce resource so has to be used efferently given the technologies available at the time so that operators get to maximise capacity on a cell before adding more infrastructure. (You wouldn’t believe the man hours modelling this problem when planning a network).

    The upshot was that GSM was a manufacturers driven organisation that also included national and international regulators (ITU and CEPT (European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations set up in ’59). The EC/EU was involved and made a number or proposals and was instrumental in pushing national regulators.

    The early GSM standard focused on the radio interface as that would allow more manufacturers to enter the market, not just the big telecoms infrastructure players and standards bodies were hot on testing compliance. There were other standards but these weren’t always adhered to by manufacturers. (Yes you can buy our base stations (BTS) but sorry we haven’t done have a fully compatible base station controller (BSC) to BSC interface yet so you’ll have to buy out BSCs as well.)

    The rest of the world developed its own standards and even though some regional standardisation was supposed to take place it didn’t and countries allowed minor, but technically difficult, changes so that technologies like CDMA in the US and Asia didn’t get standardised to the same extent and they lost out on scale.

    As Charles said, the success of GSM led other regions to realise that global standardisation had massive benefits and so GSM officially became Global System for Mobile.

    That lesson was learned for the Internet although standards aren’t enforced with the same vigour.

  9. @cgales. Repealed is repealed. Replaced by being superseded is something completely different. See most finance regulation which is thickets of rules many of which the regulators don’t even know exist nor do they know their usefulness.

  10. Seem to recall that some of the quality issue with Japanese cars was partly due to the US restricting their steel production after WW2 and only selling them poorer quality product.
    It also interesting looking at the U.K. where the existing manufacturers culled their dealership network giving the Japanese a ready made group desperate for a supplier

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