This week in Brexitland, December 1, 2022

What British retailers, large and small, think about Brexit

December brings into view Christmas and with that, everyone engaging in the retail sector a lot more than they usually do. Tis' the season when we buy things, basically. This made me think of the good old Red Tape Initiative again, the thing I did for two years between 2017 and 2019 where I went through a huge chunk of the EU-related laws on the UK statute books and then asked hundreds of businesses across nine different sectors of the economy what EU-related laws they most wanted getting rid of post-Brexit. And perhaps, in some ways, the most interesting sector was retail because what we found there was not what I expected.

This week, the British Chamber of Commerce conducted a survey of their members about the government's vaunted "Brexit freedoms" Bill, or whatever they are calling the piece of legislation that will idiotically set a sunset clause for any and all laws derived from EU Directives. Predictably, British businesses don't like the whole thing. William Bain, who is head of trade policy at the British Chamber of Commerce, had this to say about it all:

“Businesses did not ask for this bill, and as our survey highlights, they are not clamouring for a bonfire of regulations for the sake of it. They don’t want to see divergence from EU regulations which makes it more difficult, costly or impossible to export their goods and services.”

As always when talking about Brexit, let us note the source here. Although Tories like to paint anti-Brexit sentiment as the preserve of the left, the BCC are pretty far from that territory. I mean, the BCC is prime old school Tory-land, a place where finding a Tory government this far away from what the organisation thinks and feels would have been all but impossible to even imagine pre-Brexit. The decision to leave the EU was anti many things, one of them being business.

All of this is simply a warmup to the story I'm here to tell you, which is about what the Red Tape Initiative found out having researched the topic of EU laws the British retail sector would like to get rid of. For a long time, retail seemed in lore to be a place that should be filled with plenty of goodies for Brexiters to munch upon. Bendy bananas being the most obvious, of course.

We, the Red Tape Initiative, spoke to hundreds of retailers, large, medium and small. We figured out areas of general regulatory issues they might have and then tried to connect them to EU-derived legislation. We prompted them on areas we felt they might have queries. In other words, we did everything we could to prise out EU stuff British retailers might not like in order to discover some "Brexit benefits" related to the retail sector. We made it as easy to identify the EU stuff as we possibly could.

And you know what we found? Do you want to guess?

That's right. Nothing. Not one thing. There was not a single piece of EU-derived legislation that we could get anyone from the retail sector to agree had to go.

We found plenty of things they didn't want to be touched, regulation-wise. A concern across the sector was that EU-derived regs were going to be stripped away and replaced with UK stuff that was much worse. A good example we've seen already is the idea of creating a UKCA safety marking, to supersede the CE ones from the EU doing the same thing. Of course, just another layer of needless red tape the government is still talking about creating for businesses, all in a hunt to make Brexit "count".

Many retailers also expressed a long standing wish for the UK to join the Schengen area. This is because it had long been felt that the UK gets far fewer Chinese tourists than they might otherwise get if Great Britain was in Schengen (due to the fact that Chinese tourists are required to get a separate visa to visit the UK when they come to Europe, and while obviously many of them do, it is logically hypothesised that many more might come and buy lots of retail goodies in Britain if they didn't have to do this). In other words, UK retailers have long wanted to be closer to the EU, not further away.

Retail is one sector, but a it's big one in the UK, employing around three million people. And again, it has been cited as a goldmine of possible regulation stripping so many times by Brexiters over the years. And yet, having examined this in depth, I discovered not a single bendy banana.

One thing to say about the whole Red Tape Initiative process: most businesses were not chomping at the bit to get rid of EU-related legislation in general. Nor were there huge regulatory burdens they felt they were facing full stop. Some minor stuff, yes, things they would like to see changed to allow them to do business better, of course. But little of what they wanted changed was in fact EU-related. A huge concern across every sector we covered was a worry about what Brexit would mean for access into the single market, although admittedly, some big businesses thought that overall things could shake out for them favourably given they would be much more able to withstand huge, negative changes to the market (whereas, smaller businesses would struggle or go under).

I remain astonished as to how little enthusiasm business had back then for Brexit. That appears to remain the same today - in fact, with the advent of leaving the EU, this feeling feels like it has only grown. I've speculated on this before, but it does make you wonder how long the Conservative party can cling to a central policy that isn't popular and that the business community increasingly dislikes. It's a question of how many people can the Tories afford to alienate and not face electoral annihilation. I suppose the next general election will answer that question.

Thanks for reading. If you haven't subscribed, please do, and I'll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.