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Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

The article explicitly states Google is pre-empting the UK diverging significantly from EU law in order to get a trade deal with the US.

I don't think that's a bad bet given that Downing Street is keen to make clear food standards and the NHS are also up for grabs.

If anything, data protection is so badly understood as being important to ministers, it would not surprise me if they trade it away in order to protect food standards and the NHS because they're more prevalent in the headlines and scarier to the over-50s that predominantly voted for Brexit and this government.

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It's true, it's weird the NHS should be up for grabs considering it's older people who would be most hurt by changes to the NHS who voted for the Brexit.

But it's also a bit weird. I mean, I guess the issue with the NHS is drugs. Australia has long had policies the US doesn't like, like the single purchaser PBS and parallel imports. But we still have a FTA with the US.

The NHS isn't up for grabs, never has been and never will be. It's just a scare story with zero foundation. Classic truth by repeated assertion.

The same was said about the single market, we're leaving that now contrary to statements by: Owen Paterson Daniel Hannan Nigel Farage Matthew Elliot Arron Banks

I believe they called it project fear

Given the President and all his advisors have pointed out that it must be, I'd love to see your working on that one.

It’s more the EU diverging from the status quo it shares with the UK if the CJEU rules inadequate US data protection guarantees (which under the laughable fig-leaf that is Privacy Shield, i.e. the honor system). The likelihood a UK desperate for a US free trade agreement would follow the EU in banning data transfers to the US is slim to none.

Neither food safety nor the NHS are up for grabs - as you well know.

Quite why these scare stories persist is beyond me. Has rationality left Hacker News as well?

I don't believe there is a single briefing on the matter - save the one line the President generously gave just before the election stating the contrary - where it hasn't been clear that access to the UK's health market and the ability to import US meat with lower health/safety criteria were not mentioned as being key to a US trade deal.

You can call them scare stories, but in truth your denial running contrary to all known actual evidence is a real problem here.

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