Perhaps not enough red tape will get put on that bonfire because they’re only talking of the one sector here. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with but the one step and all that. The current leak – for that’s what it is, perhaps trial balloon – is that the government’s going to cut City red tape:
Britain is drawing up plans to axe swathes of pre-Brexit financial rules after giving up hope that Brussels will grant the City widespread access to the Single Market, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
The Treasury has begun scrutinising the whole suite of finance regulations which were kept in British law after our departure from the European Union, with a view to weeding out cumbersome red tape and enhancing London’s role as a global trading hub.
It comes amid growing acceptance in the Government that Brussels is not prepared to offer market access to enough UK financial industries to make sticking closely to its regulations worthwhile.
This makes perfect sense.
As we know certain foreigners get frit at the sight of a market. Their preference is that folks only get to do what a bureaucrat has already signed off on. Sure, we might think they’re silly to do that but that is their choice in their place. Liberalism does mean allowing Johnny Foreigner to get on with the foreignness bit.
It’s also true that if we wish to trade with them – or, perhaps, allow them to buy our fine products – then we’ve got to have agreement over the terms of what those bargains are going to be. In a bureaucratic state like them over there that means the bureaucrats have to agree. Again, we might not like that but their manor, their rules.
We then face a trade off. For their bureaucratic insistence is that if we’re to trade with them then we must use their rules in our domestic economy. It’s possible that their rules are better. It’s possible they’re not.
But we do have a difference of systems here. We Anglos tend to use markets more than they do. They tend to use universal banking more than we do. We use – this is a spectrum of tendencies, not a bipolar world – public markets for equity, for commercial paper, for bonds, where they often enough use bank loans. This is why all those complaints from the likes of Willy Hutton about British banks not providing risk equity are so misplaced. We have just a different system of achieving the same goal.
But that’s the insistence that is being made. We here must play by their rules here to be allowed to sell stuff to them there. Maybe this is worth it. Maybe the gain from selling to them – it’s voluntary exchange, benefits both sides – is greater than the hobbling of our domestic system. Maybe it isn’t.
They then say that you bastard Saxons aren’t going to be allowed to sell to us effetes anyway. At which point the correct response is bugger you we’re taking our ball and going home.
Which is what is being floated as that possible government response.
Huzzah. ‘Bout time too.
Clearly written by someby illiterate in English, they’ve got their subject/object the wrong way around. That should be “that Brussels will grant the EU widespread access to the City”.
But, if furriners want to ban themselves from certain actions, thet’s their business.
The key: “Enhancing London’s role as a global trading hub.” Abandoning EU rules in UK law might violate some foreigners’ standards, but in the same breath makes London more efficient and thus more desirable to them, to foreign firms needing capital and to those having it. Europeans will eventually demand access to it. On the off chance Gov’t repeals a healthy regulation, firms will still be bound by concern for their reputations. All benefit and no cost, apart from finding new “jobs” for auditors.
Surely the headline should be “EU to prevent EU businesses buying best available financial products”?
Here’s a bunch of people freely choosing to use the CIty because its best/cheapest and now they won’t be able to. Any loss we make they make too. Because it’s trade.
It remains a puzzle why so few people understand this at an intellectual level but do so at an instinctual level.