Lee Rotherham is author of the newly-published Ten Years On – Britain without the European Union, which is available for free via this website while stocks last. Set in 2020, the book documents a “history” of Britain between 2010 and 2020 in which, under a Cameron Government, Britain regains power from Brussels and enters a very different relationship with the EU. Here is the first of several abridged extracts of the book, in this case looking at how a business owner benefited.
Sheila Jones runs a successful small business in Birmingham, called Gentle Breezes. Over the past twelve months, it has expanded and taken on two new members of staff. As Sheila says, ‘hiring people is now a fairly straightforward process and I don’t have to spend hours explaining my reasons and decisions on various, complicated, forms.’
Like everyone else in the UK, Sheila knows the amount of red tape that choked British business in the past has been drastically cut. The process of review began within weeks of breaking with the old EU structures. It was no easy task; there were thousands upon thousands of statutory instruments, putting into law 105,000 pages of European regulations. These needed to be sifted to determine which ones made sense, which were superfluous and which went way beyond the original intent and were simply doing damage. A lot fell into the last category. The review quickly revealed just how many bad laws went far beyond the original EU intent because our own officialdom had enthusiastically added to the text for reasons of its own.
Tens of thousands of pages of regulations were either simplified or cut. Businesses were amongst the major winners. Sheila tells us, ‘I know for a fact that I do two hours fewer paperwork every week. Even the Health and Safety paperwork, it used to be my particular bugbear, is a lot clearer, and it now seems to be based on common sense.’ She also points out to us how the legislation governing waste disposal used to be simply self-defeating. ‘A small firm like ours was expected to cough up £850 in a given year to be compliant with just one directive, with a wall of paperwork that aimed to push waste to travel further. All that actually did was encourage our local fly tippers. You know, the worst thing was we just had to pass these compliance costs on to the consumer, never mind the extra £15 per tonne we had to pay to dispose of the waste.’
In some cases the simplification process lightened the legislation while keeping the intent, rubbing away much of the gold plating; in others, the bureaucracy was so heavy for so little benefit we just dumped it. Within a few years the clear out was judged to have saved two per cent of the country’s GDP. That totted up to a staggering £19 billion. Sheila says to us, ‘two percent off my cost base gave me room to expand the company this year.’
Thanks to the trade agreement the UK has with the EU, her company continues to deal with the same continental customers and suppliers she had before 2010. The punishing tariffs some feared would be the price of UK independence have never materialised because it was never in the interests of any of the UK’s business partners to cut off their own nose to spite their face. So Gabi from Frankfurt still calls once a week, while Aleix and Llora in Barcelona have increased their orders on last year’s, thanks to the striking new floral design that’s proven quite a hit.
But then, as Sheila says, ‘like most British companies, eighty per cent of my business has always been with shops in this country, all the way from Penrith to Southend and everywhere in between. Another ten percent I’ve done with the States and Australia and countries elsewhere outside the EU. All the rules and regulations – the red tape – that used to be forced on me from Brussels had a really deadly impact on all of my business though it was actually only relevant to one tenth of it, so the burden was mismatched.’
Sheila’s very excited about the phone call from Shanghai. The city’s economic growth this year is practically double that of the national Chinese average and even that is 6.9 per cent. In Shanghai alone there are potentially thousands of new consumers, who this year now have the jobs, the money and the interest to, buy her products. Truly, the future for ‘Gentle Breezes’ is far bigger than just the EU, it is global.