After Brexit, you need paperwork to prove that your stuff that you would like to import or export meets the trade agreement criteria(for example, to prevent people from buying from, let's say China, then import it tarif free into EU, you need to have proper documentation proving that most of the value of your product comes from UK). You can no longer hire whoever you think is the best for your business, you need to go through the government bureaucracy first.
It's weird, it's like Texas leaving the USA to get rid of the federal government then doing everything according to the federal government requirements to be able to sell stuff to the USA and hot having a say on it. Why would you do that?
Honestly, I think UK leaving the EU was a loss for EU(the institution) mostly due to the loss of UK input in the governance.
The rest is a tragedy for the young, losing the ability to live and work in EU or UK and chase their dreams. Can you imagine people from different states in the US not being able to move wherever they want?
Now that the show is done, literally nobody in the UK division knows how to ship the equipment back to Germany. It's not that the paperwork is complex, the paperwork simply doesn't exist.
The single market has led to many many landfills not being filled due to the paper that trade before the single market would have generated.
If an annoying cookie pop-up does not close (with an opt out) in 2 clicks, it's illegal; that's part of GDPR because of this malicious compliance. (making people click each option individually).
Would you rather be ignorant of the fact that you're being tracked with 200 cookies? Why is it the EU's fault that companies have so much tracking?
Perhaps you should complain to the companies that are sending you the cookies and not the EU that's simply bringing to light a shady business practice.
Yes? I know I'm tracked and I know I can do nothing about it besides accepting the annoying cookie warning, so it's pretty much meaningless unless there is option Reject All. If you must always allow at least "essential" cookies them it's while warning meaningless.
Either show me no warning or give me Reject all button, nothing in between, otherwise it just shows your incompetence to solve the problem.
It's as meaningful as permanent sign "There is traffic jam on this road", though that sign one would be less annoying.
I always loved in some subway system in Asia regular PSA "There were pickpocketers detected in subway system", really helpful... Dunno whether it was India or HK or somewhere.
"The CNIL found that Google and Facebook's failures to make non-essential cookies as easy to reject as to accept invalidated the consent on which the businesses relied. Whereas cookies could be accepted by a single 'click', a number of steps were needed to reject them."
...
"The CNIL stressed that consent must be freely given which implies that it must be as easy for a user to accept non-essential cookies as to reject them."
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6001cd19-ecbf...
The gears are turning slowly but they are turning.
Also that a lot of the complaining is coming from the same kinds of people who want government, in general, to be "so small you can drown it in a bathtub", which viewpoint I never really have a lot of time for.
it's still there (and increases every year), just you don't see it when buying/selling between member states
As opposed to the US, where you can have: local/municipal > county > (non-nation) state > federal.
And there are good reasons for that. The EU likes to "reduce" red tape by replacing country-specific systems with its own. This can be seen as a reduction if you believe everyone in Europe had to handle every other countries systems simultaneously, and there are (mostly business) cases where that was sometimes actually true. But the vast majority of the time it wasn't. Most people, most of the time, were handling only their own countries bureaucracy and trading with firms in their own country, or one or two others at most.
If your country has a relatively lightweight process which is tailored for local needs and well understood by local people, which is then "harmonized" by the EU, it's both possible and common that the amount of red tape in your life increases. The fact that there are now fewer systems across Europe than before doesn't make any difference because you weren't interacting with them anyway.
In the UK there are several reasons why the EU got a really bad reputation for regulation:
1. Many EU regulations are newly created and regulate aspects of daily life where there is no obvious trade benefit and nobody was asking for it. Example: around the time of the referendum the Commission was trying to introduce regulations that would "harmonize" the power of kettles, which would mean they'd take far longer to boil than before. Guess which country boils kettles way more than any other? They quietly delayed the introduction of these rules, because they knew it'd piss off Brits and make them more likely to vote Leave.
2. There have been many cases where something was happening that both voters and politicians thought was obviously stupid, yet, politicians couldn't fix it because EU rules prevented it. An example of this is the deportation of terrorists, which EU rules routinely blocked on grounds many voters thought weren't very good (e.g. right to family life). Again this has nothing to do with reducing bureaucracy or making trade easier, it's just about controlling local decisions.
3. Many EU regulations that annoy people on a daily basis, e.g. cookie banners and voters never cared about any of this. Their priorities have never been internet related things.
4. From the British viewpoint EU rules are often seen as vague and arbitrarily or unfairly enforced. There are many examples that could be used to illustrate that.
Since Brexit there have been a steady stream of situations that fit this template: media/voters get upset about government doing something that looks stupid, government comes under pressure and fixes it, then says "Oh and actually, it turns out the ability to do this is another Brexit freedom that wouldn't have been possible in the EU". Invariably whatever they're doing seems obvious and nothing special, without any obvious reason why EU bureaucracy would have stopped it. This reinforces the impression that there must have been far more EU rules on stuff than anyone realized. It raises the obvious question - how many obvious things weren't getting done for decades, because they violated some rule and so politicians or bureaucrats just ignored them completely? Remember, the iron law of the EU is nobody can fix anything.
The ECtHR is tasked with upholding fundamental freedoms like the Convention, the UN Charter of Rights, etc. and is completely separate from the EU.
"In May 2016, shortly before the EU referendum in the UK, the EU advocate general stated that the court was considering whether the European Court of Justice should adopt powers to rule on all cases of extradition of terrorists, a move described by analysts as ‘European Union power grab’ and rejected by most member States (Slack, 2016). The plan played into the hands of Brexit campaigners who used it to campaign against UK remaining in the EU with the former shadow home secretary David Davis (Now BREXIT minister) stating ‘The argument that Europe is somehow improving our security is falling apart in the Government’s hands’ (Slack, 2016). Thus, exit of the UK from the EU will make it easier for the country to deport foreign nationals, both EU and non-EU citizens, that could be of potential threats to the country."
For EU citizens applying in an EU country other than their own, it's a fixed 50 euro fee plus the basics of proving a relationship with some simple documentation: cohabitation and mixed finances.
If you're doing it your own country, the process is much, much more expensive and complicated.
- Old communist mines have closed due to environmental regulation. This is good, but it is regulation.
- Food must now be strictly labeled. Again good, but more regulation. For instance, milk has strict packaging regulations and can no longer be sold easily in farmer's markets. This drove the price up.
- Public infrastructure must meet certain standards in order to access EU funds. These regulations are again good. But certain local corrupt politicians fail to get their buddies' company to respect them, so they just use local funds.
- GDPR and EU copyright acts: these are more regulation, which I think is not so good. See my opinions here: https://danuker.go.ro/tag/eu.html
I think where we differ in conclusions is whether or not we think a change in regulations means more regulations. It more likely is fewer but more restrictive regulations instead. This is a bit of a semantic argument however, I admit, but on top of that I happen to mostly agree with the more restrictive regulation in most cases.
Again, thank you for your thoughtful counter-opinion
In the past there were fewer words/pages in the law, and a lighter burden of compliance.
But some processes have become more streamlined, such as paying taxes.