A hill to die on
Who would have thought that plastic bottle tops were a perfect illustration of Brexit and also a hill to die on for the Brexiteers?
As you may have noticed plastic bottle tops now stay attached to the bottle, to prevent billions of the little beggars getting loose and polluting the world. This is apparently, and this is news to me, the result of an EU directive. A wise move to try to reduce pollution across the EU you might think, but it also applies in the UK, or to be precise, it doesn’t.
Because we have left the EU the directive does not effect us, (a classic case of regulatory divergence by inertia, which I have mentioned before) but any British manufacturer of plastic bottle who wants to sell in the EU has to follow the EU rules.
As British industry, Remain and anyone with an ounce of common sense has been pointing out for years now, no company is going to run two production lines, one that meets EU standards and a British one that meets lower UK standards. They will run the one with higher standards and sell them in the UK and the rest of Europe.
Hey Presto! The Brexit fools have discovered that these new bottle tops have been “imposed” on the UK by the EU, we are not free or sovereign, EU regulations still apply, we are still in the dead clutch of Brussels, chained to a corpse and so on, all in a constant whining voice. .
Well, welcome to the real world fools!
These bottle tops are not imposed on us, we are not subject to EU directives, but we will now use them because it is common sense. There is little or no advantage in setting UK only standards, there is no economic boost from so doing, only considerable cost. The EU is a regulatory superpower, we are not. Real life economics trumps sad fantasies, you had better get to like it.
Also, and I really love this one, there is going to be far, far more of this sort of thing. The new Government has promised to “mirror” EU rules when necessary.
The promise of some low-regulation, economically dynamic UK, free of pointless directives and unburdened by red tape is dead.
Reality wins, but that won’t stop the nutters from still believing. I rather hope that the Tory party leadership competition is won by the person who promises “British bottle tops, for Great British bottles.”
Didn’t Yes Minister end on such a note?
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
What a brilliant, if somewhat niche, example of all that was the stupidity of Brexshit. May 'the parable of the bottle tops' be taught to children throughout the land, so that they may grow up that bit wiser than their foolish forebears.
It seems to me that the swivel-eyed loons and chums don’t always like the term ‘UK’, often preferring ‘Great Britain’ or ‘Britain’, presumably because of the (inaccurate) connotations of greatness, despite the political inaccuracy. How wonderful that they will try and find a hill to die on (please, and soon) made of something so trivial, and where they are so plainly wrong. Stupid enough when bojo said “fuck business”, now it’s positively moronic.