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Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

Er, the UK has a good deal in the EU. The EU is a good thing and it gets an awful lot of blame unfairly. The EU is meant to harmonise regulation among member nations, and yet the many in the UK would blame the EU for regulation that would be in place anyway.

Things like working time regulations, so that employers across the EU have to abide by the same technical regulations. Things like making employers only make their employees work ~40 hours per week, and yet the EU is blamed for the 'Working time directive'.

There are other things, like animal welfare with the transport of animals, where the EU gets blame for the regulation, but the reality is that there would have to be regulation for the amount of time animals spend time in transport. Because the regulation is headlined as 'EU' regulation the EU gets the blame. The point is that there would UK regulation if there wasn't a EU regulation.

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People really misunderstand what the EU is.

Article 50 will likely never be triggered. The costs of triggering it are enormous because the UK would have to literally sit there copying EU laws and turning them into UK laws. There's zero incentive to diverge because if you want to sell into the EU you need to abide by the EU regs anyway.

The entire thing is fucking pointless.

Yup, this. I agree.

>Article 50 will likely never be triggered. //

There's hope at least. But we've pulled the trigger, saying the bullet might not hit home isn't going to help, if we miss then the people we were shooting at aren't going to want to be friends anymore.

Sorry if that's twisting an analogy too far.

We dun goofed.

That's why we have a parliament, to stop us making these bad decisions, only PM May has said she's not going to let parliament operate (which sounds like it should be unlawful, certainly as Treason) just in case they decide not to follow the marginal vote in to the void. Presumably all to save face as backing down would be awkward for her now.

And that's, my grandchildren, is how one politicians pride killed Europe and destabilised World economies for decades ...

There's zero incentive to diverge because if you want to sell into the EU you need to abide by the EU regs anyway.

But that only applies to products and services that will actually be sold in other EU member states. Not everything is exported to the EU, and a lot of things are never exported at all, and diverging from the EU rules in those other cases could offer all kinds of advantages depending on the circumstances.

It'll be a pick and choose situation. The UK does not care at all for ideas like freedom of expression. An example is the fact that it is illegal to draw or posses or distribute drawings depicting fictitious children engaged in sexual situations. This isn't an old law that's just a relic of history that's been forgotten to be erased, it's a relatively new one.

With the kind of attitude this displays, I have a bad feeling about the "Bill of Rights" that the government has promised to create.

>Things like working time regulations, so that employers across the EU have to abide by the same technical regulations. //

Isn't the point that the capitalist leaders don't want things like the WTD and the ECHR getting in the way of their "right" to exploit low paid workers?

You're right, we'll still have nearly all the regulations but ours won't have to get passed by the socialist countries of the EU and so will be much more Conservative friendly.

Selling in to Europe is the main sticking point as we'll need to abide by the regulations on production in order to make goods ready for the EU market if we get access.

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