In message , at 14:18:37 on
Sat, 12 Nov 2016, Optimist remarked:
On Sat, 12 Nov 2016 09:34:40 +0000, Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at 09:10:00 on
Sat, 12 Nov 2016, Optimist remarked:

The question was more for yourself, to make you think about the
complexities of the situation. I doubt if the Great Repeal Bill will go
into the level of detail above, for the hundreds of Directives which
will need considering.

Er, no.

Directives are instructions from EU to member states to legislate, so
their provisions are already
law.

But rely on ECJ caselaw. Will we airbrush that out on Brexit day, or
will we (can we even) continue to rely upon it?

That depends on the drafting of the legislation.

That's a truism, not an answer.

Regulations are laws brought in directly by EU bypassing national
parliaments entirely. It is these
laws which will need to formally brought into UK law before we leave,
otherwise laws would disappear
overnight. Afterwards laws can be reviewed in normal way.

Will the Regulations be redrafted in UK-speak (the way transpositions of
Directives are), or what?

I imagine there would be a blanket clause just to state that
regulations in force on dd/mm/yyyy are
brought into UK law. But I'm not a lawyer. Check with the Brexit department.

I hope you took this all into account when you voted.

New trade deals are being discussed now.

And the results may be known in ten years time.

Why ten years? Could be ten weeks or ten months.

It takes that long to work out the detail.

No it doesn't, draft agreements with some countries are already taking
shape. This can happen quite quickly, unless you think that
negotiators have to travel in person by sailing ship to discuss terms.

That's just plain wrong. In terms of 80:20 rules, 98% of the work takes
2% of the time, and the final 2% takes 98%.

No-one is saying we won't able to trade, but the outcome (if we leave
the single market in any sense) will be tariffs and barriers which will
hurt us more than them.

No, quite the reverse. UK is EU's biggest market.

Are you suggesting some kind of apparatus where the UK's import and
export tariffs are revenue neutral? It's hard to make quotas neutral.

Switzerland has signed up trade deals with far more countries than
the EU has, and UK is a bigger
opportunity for business than Switzerland is.

And how long did it take them? Also note that the Swiss GDP is a quarter
of the UK's which makes the stakes lower, and thus easier to negotiate.

They've been doing it for years, about the same time as the EU, but
with much greater success.

Do you have an example of one, with start and finish dates? And were the
same team trying to negotiate a dozen others simultaneously.

I do admit that many did vote divorce to become self-governing again.

I am old enough to remember politics before we went into the EC.
Contrary to the alarmist reports
of some, we had human rights, equal pay, maternity pay etc. We had a
health service (the NHS came
into existence when I was a few months old).

Yes, but a great deal of today's consumer/employee protection has been
added on top of that rather low base by the EU.

No-one is saying we get rid of everything the EU introduced - some of
it undoubtedly UK policy. It just means that UK will be responsible in
the future.

It'll be interesting to see how Westminster deals with the workload,
when so much new legislation will have to be fought out locally hand-to-
hand, rather than rubber-stamping something from Brussels.

We managed before 1973.

The world has become far more complicated.

Really?

Yes, take just one area - telecommunications. In that time we've gone
from "Do what PO Telephones tells you, and shut up" to hundreds of
individual rules and regulations covering thousands of suppliers.

Actually trade barriers are far lower today than fory-odd years ago.
Even if we don't get an FTA with the EU, tariffs under MFN/WTO rules
cost us less than the present cost of membership.

Tariffs are only one (of many) financial consequences of leaving.

our own regional policy (no need for regions to lobby in Brussels
against each other for a small slice of the money we pay into the EU)

It's far easier to get that sort of money from the EU than from
Westminster.

But Westminster will have more money (see above).

But more difficult to extract money from. EU grants are a bit like
applying for a mortgage, you have to present a financial case and tick
all the boxes. The money then arrive relatively painlessly. In
Westminster they'll also be asking you "why exactly do you need four
bedrooms and what's wrong with your current house".

So put pressure on MPs.

They don't make these decisions. Ministers and their unelected civil
servants do.

If they don't deal with it, chuck them out.

How do you do that?

By voting in elections. You go into a booth and put a cross on a piece
of paper against the name of the candidate of your choice.

And why do you think that a single-issue such as that will dominate an
election campaign?

That's democratic accountability.

The man in the street won't have much visibility of the EU grants issue.

See above.

I can't see anything above that leads me to think that the man on the
Clapham Omnibus will be doing an analysis of the economic impact of EU
vs Westminster grants. cf the £350m for the NHS - they didn't even get
the figure right.
--
Roland Perry