Biggest victim of Brexit is not UK but EU.

From yesterday's Times

Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, there have been stacks of po-faced articles — many of them written by me — about what leaving the European Union might mean for the UK.
Like a child whose parents are getting divorced, we’ve been obsessed with how the messy break-up would turn out for us. But here’s the funny thing: so far at least, Brexit has reshaped the EU more deeply than it has changed Britain. And in the years after Britain’s departure, the place that has ended up significantly diverging on regulation isn’t the UK, it’s the EU.
Before that fateful day in 2016, Britain was the de facto leader of a loose liberal alliance of mostly northern member states including the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and sometimes others such as Germany, depending on the policy issue at hand. They were broadly pro-enterprise and, however imperfectly, tended to push for policies that might boost competition and innovation.
This gang was pitted against the less liberal and more protectionist group headed by France and made up of mostly southern countries, such as Italy and Greece. The two opposing sides were roughly balanced politically but with Britain no longer involved, that equilibrium has been completely upended. The French-led grouping now carries disproportionate clout — or as an American sports pundit might say, they’re the ones with the Big Mo.
The German commentator Wolfgang Münchau put it bluntly in a recent UnHerd podcast: “The UK was a hugely important balancing power in the EU. Leaving has made the EU less liberal and open.”
Or, as Pieter Garicano, co-author of the Silicon Continent Substack, said to me: “Brexit took the liberal heart out of Europe. Liberal Europe is now on the back foot against the statist urge to back champions and build more regulators.”
For proof, look at the three catastrophically interventionist and anti-innovation pieces of technology legislation that the EU has introduced since 2021. They are called the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act and the EU AI Act and, taken together, they represent a genuine breakthrough in digital regulation worldwide — but not in a good way. The EU’s AI laws are so astonishingly bureaucratic that even gigantic corporations with reams of lawyers such as Meta and Apple have said they can’t comply with them, while the chief executives of European businesses including Ericsson and SAP complained in an open letter that these heavy-handed new regulations mean that Europe “now risks falling further behind in the AI era”.
Meanwhile, the overtly protectionist Digital Markets Act has been used to clobber American tech companies with fines adding up to billions of euros. Predictably, not a single European firm has been hit with penalties of meaningful scale.
And whether it’s the EU ruling that X isn’t allowed to change how its blue ticks work or forcing Meta to offer Europeans a version of Facebook and Instagram without personalised adverts, the new laws give European bureaucrats vast control to meddle with digital businesses in an arbitrary and retroactive way.
As Garicano puts it: “It was a French project to make the legislation as interventionist as possible.” And sure enough, reflecting the political reality of the post-Brexit EU, the driving force behind these sweeping new digital rules was Thierry Breton, a Frenchman.
It’s completely reasonable for different political cultures to value different things and have divergent views about what their policy objectives might be. The French-led group in the post-Brexit EU is bound together by a preference for protecting existing businesses and jobs rather than enabling disruptive innovation or entrepreneurial new market entrants.
This explains why the EU’s AI legislation vastly curtails the use of artificial intelligence across a wide range of “high-risk” areas, such as education and medical devices, with 14 extremely onerous and sclerotic stages of oversight, enforced by four new EU bodies, plus additional authorities within each member state. So if you’re a European entrepreneur wanting to create an AI tutor for schools, the EU will require you to undertake lengthy impact assessments, designate authorised representatives, notify various regulators and submit to lengthy monitoring — all before students can even start testing your software. Good luck with that. With Britain not at the table, there was no nation with sufficient weight to say “non” to any of this nonsense.
It is hard to overstate just how economically damaging these new rules are going to be, both in terms of stifling start-up innovation and deterring investment by global businesses.
In a sense, it is comical that the EU is introducing oppressive regulations on technologies such as AI and social media when it doesn’t have a single globally significant company in these areas. But the EU’s regulatory ratchet couldn’t be worse timed. Since the financial crisis, the eurozone economy has gone from being roughly the same size as the United States’ to now being only half as big. And in sectors ranging from autonomous vehicles to cloud computing, European firms lag kilometres behind their American counterparts.
The comparisons are sobering across the board. The EU hasn’t produced a single tech company from scratch with a market capitalisation of more than €100 billion, while the US has spawned seven valued at more than €1 trillion. Indeed, Apple is worth as much as every company in France’s stock market (the EU’s biggest) combined, while Tesla Motors is worth ten times as much as VW, Europe’s largest automaker.
This really ought to be the moment when the EU tries to unleash entrepreneurship. Instead, the French-dominated policy machine has gone the other way.
Small wonder Meta has said it can’t roll out its new AI products in the EU and Apple has had to delay the launch of its AI services there, too. As the leading global digital analyst Ben Thompson wrote recently: “Europe is much closer than it realises to simply driving tech companies away.”
But to return to the perennial post-Brexit topic: what does it all mean for Britain? Unless you were a dogmatic weirdo (and there were plenty on both sides), the question of whether or not to leave the EU was always about trade-offs. What were the costs and benefits of staying versus leaving?
The hard truth for Remainers like me is that the EU’s lamentably awful new tech regulations do materially increase the costs and downsides of some day rejoining. But at least there’s one small consolation. If anyone asks me why the EU has waged war on tech start-ups in such a counterproductive way, I have a ready-made and well-worn reply: #BlameBrexit.

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So

Thank you for that article Gaffer

quote from Gaffer's article:

"If anyone asks me why the EU has waged war on tech start-ups in such a counterproductive way, I have a ready-made and well-worn reply: #BlameBrexit"

So I take it that he means by that, then if Britain had still been in the EU, then Britain could have persuaded the other EU States not to implement the anti Digital and anti AI (artificial intelligence) policies ?

But did France and Germany, who basically run the EU, did they ever listen to any objections that Britain ever made about EU policies ?

Over to you Cheshire Puss, what do you think about Gaffer's article about the EU, do you still want to rejoin a failing and increasingly distant from reality organisation, such as the EU now is ?

Since when has anything that has been published in the Times been taken for the word of God for goodness sake ?

Look at the state of our country at the moment.
The proof of the pudding is in the economy, or lack of it.
The bottom line is we are in a worse state economically post brexit regardless of what was one persons opinion in a national tabloid paper.

Wait until Trump takes over and gets his teeth into us and starts implementing his tariffs on all goods entering the USA. If he gets involved in a trade war with large EU exporters it would have a severe impact on our economy. Our relationship with the EU needs to improve if we want to get out of this mess.

Cheshire Puss

If you are just going to 'rubbish' informed opinions, just because they don't suit your narrative, then conversation about such things, can be likened to that of being a broken pencil

TTS

There’s none so blind as those who will not see.

The Times a tabloid newspaper, it may well be a tabloid in physical size but its writers and coverage are those of a broadsheet.

Trump’s beef is with Germany.

The US is the UK’s largest export market by country. The US has a modest trade surplus with the UK. The UK is unlikely to be a target for US tariffs it doesn’t fit Trump’s criteria for tariff penalties.

The state of the UK economy is more a matter of unaffordable welfare spending, we are living beyond our means, than being in or out of the EU.

Posted by: gaffer (8260) [View gaffer's page]
"Trump’s beef is with Germany."

I agree with you on that one.
Any trade fall out between the USA and Germany would be a severe blow to the worldwide economy, including the UK.
Surely it would lead to another rise in inflation and higher interest rates plus a reduction in economy growth?
That is the last thing we need in the current climate