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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

I found your comment really interesting, I think there are quite a few vested interests involved in the desire to leave the EU. This and most notably the work on tax havens the EU was doing, the UK being one of the biggest with several opaque jurisdictions being under its control. Saying GCHQ doesn’t make political decisions by downvoting this is extremely naive.

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What's the value of acknowledging that some vested interests hold the view though? At face value I mean. There are lots of legitimate economic reasons to consider leaving the EU, it's not the unilaterally bad decision that's become a meme around here and Reddit, the reason I say this being that it shouldn't be surprising in and of itself as a decision.

The only economic reason I can think of is “I have a plan which requires violating EU rules, which will be more valuable than the additional trade costs that will be caused in the event that the EU continues to think that that rule we want to violate is a good rule and insists on the UK not breaking it as a precondition for a zero-friction trade deal”.

I would be more optimistic if the UK government didn’t appear to hold the position “pivot to a no-manufacturing/service-only economy while simultaneously aiming for a trade deal that only covers food, mining, and manufacturing but not services”.

> The only economic reason I can think of is “I have a plan which requires violating EU rules, which will be more valuable than the additional trade costs that will be caused in the event that the EU continues to think that that rule we want to violate is a good rule and insists on the UK not breaking it as a precondition for a zero-friction trade deal”.

That is basically true. And the economics of this sort of situation is kinda funny; the only way Britain will be materially worse off is if the EU was giving Britain a free ride before Brexit - otherwise market forces will probably kick in and not much will happen in practice. Realistically it is hard to see Britain being worse off because of anything externally inflicted. If anything, their biggest losses will be due to getting the stuff they want; like restricting migrant inflows for non-economic reasons.

> the only way Britain will be materially worse off is if the EU was giving Britain a free ride before Brexit

Isn’t that the point of the club? To give all of the members a free ride with each other? In a well-defined way that doesn’t hurt each member but still a free ride?

Not in the economic sense where a free rider under-pays meaning someone else has to be over-paying.

If everyone is underpaying then it isn't free riding; it is just sensible business.

Hmm. EU members get advantages from each other that non-members do not get, so by leaving the EU, the UK looses said benefit, which hurts both even if everyone else in the world retains exactly the same trading rules with each as they did before Brexit.

I’m not going to be too precise with terminology, but I didn’t realise you were being precise either or I would’ve at least looked up the concept before my previous reply.

> biggest losses

economic losses

The uk could veto anything from the eu so if they wanted to violate eu law they could have stopped it being created in the first place, there is no rational reason for brexit

In practice I agree; I was trying to be generous and find a situation where it wasn’t entirely silly. I don’t believe the UK government has thought this thought, or indeed know what it has already agreed to in the withdrawal agreement.

Many EU laws are badly thought out nonsense that doesn't make anything better and often makes things worse. So yeah, that's pretty much the meat of it. Lawmaking is hard. You say yourself, you view British politicians as incompetent - so you recognise that lawmaking is a matter in which competence can make a big difference.

A simple sort of plan that British companies might have could be, for instance, to not require tons of annoying cookie popups on their websites.

In other cases expect laws to get tighter. EU financial regulation isn't as solid as the UK's is. This was a sore point after the collapse of the Icelandic banks. British regulators had raised the alarm over those banks but could do nothing to stop them because they were regulated by Iceland and under EU rules the UK had to allow them to trade. When they went pop and the Icelandic government refused to bail them out, the Brits were left carrying the can. Given that financial regulation is popular with the public I'd expect that to be one of the areas in which regulations diverge.

It's not a GCHQ government though.

GCHQ has nothing to fear from Europe, and Europe has done nothing to hinder the work of GCHQ apart from releasing a few reports about ECHELON.

GDPR, and every other bit of EU privacy regulation, has included exemptions for the security services.

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