Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought actually Brexit supported the left much more than the right.

I think we see that with two of Labour's key manifesto pledges would be either impossible or very difficult to do with EU/SM membership.

Firstly - VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Potentially you could argue for some exemption but I think it would be very slow.

Secondly - Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK railways is really at odds with EU policy. Netherlands has an ECJ case pending because they do not allow private operators to bid for at least parts of it. I think this could potentially be mitigated but it is really not the spirit or direction of travel of EU law.

I think it's also important to add while a lot of legislation wasn't repealed, a lot of EU legislation is not being added to UK statue books. I think the UK would want to take a very different path on AI regulation vs the EU for example, and had we stayed in would have been a huge point of contention.

There is a lot more nuance in this Brexit argument. While I certainly didn't support it, this does not mean everything the EU does is good, especially in tech. There is too much black and white thinking going on with it. I'd also add that EU growth has been exceptionally poor compared to the US. Something is going wrong in Europe as a whole; and I suspect poor quality overregulation by the EU on growth industries is a (potentially small) part of that picture.

> Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK railways

Has already been implemented by the Tories, as all the private rail operators essentially went insolvent, Covid being the coup de grâce. That would be allowed under EU rules.

EU regulations require, IIRC, separation of railway infrastructure companies (like Network Rail is in UK) from actual transport operators. The new regs coming in require that everyone (who gets through necessary certification) can bid for time/space allocation on the infrastructure.

It does not mean you have to privatise or can't nationalize railways, it just means that private operators can exist and have to be able to use same rules and rates for access to infrastructure.

Whether it's good idea or not I can't say, but there's a lot of pro-trade neolibby thought like that in last few decades of EU law.

> VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law.

Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?

Please see the guidelines[0] on how to treat people.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Seems a reasonable question to me, not cross-examining.

Quick search leads to the EU council directive on VAT Article 132[0], section I and J which says:

    Member States shall exempt the following transactions:

    [...]

    (i) the provision of children's or young people's education, school or university education, vocational training or retraining, including the supply of services and of goods closely related thereto, by bodies governed by public law having such as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects;

    (j) tuition given privately by teachers and covering school or university education;

That wording seems quite clearcut, but then there's a reason I'm not a lawyer.

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

The EU VAT directive is long misunderstood. Countries have extreme room for interpretation of the VAT rules. For example, Ireland beat the UK on making period products tax exempt by about 20 years, something supposedly disallowed by EU directives. I know Greece charges VAT on fee-paying schools, and the EU doesn't do anything about it.

Ireland, in fairness, has a history of doing tax things just this side of the law, occasionally straying into the wrong side. Notable examples would be corporation tax prior to 2013 (see the Apple thing) and VRT (the EC has actually commented on this, essentially saying that it's legal but against the spirit of the law).

But yeah, very little stopping the UK following Ireland's lead, particularly on relatively trivial matters like the private school fees thing.

I don't think there are any examples of people spouting nonsense over what was allowed? What are you thinking of exactly? What you did sometimes see is that the UK actually followed EU law pretty closely, whereas other countries would flout it to a greater or lesser extent, and then the EU's supporters would say "look see, you can do X Y or Z whilst being in the EU". Which wasn't correct. Unfortunately it was a case of, for the EU's friends ... anything. For the UK, the law.

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