The UK in a Changing Europe podcast: Regulation special!

The UK in a Changing Europe Podcast

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4.3 • 105 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2026

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The freedom to regulate (or deregulate) independently from the EU was at the heart of the Eurosceptic vision of Brexit. However, very little meaningful divergence was achieved under successive Conservative governments and closer alignment with EU rules is now seen as central to the current government's EU reset and growth agendas. On this episode of the UK in a Changing Europe podcast, Anand Menon is joined by our dynamic duo of regulation experts Jill Rutter and Joël Reland to unpack what has driven this marked change. Tune in to find out more about why the Conservatives made so little use of 'Brexit freedoms' to diverge when they had the chance, what regulations actually do and why the public tend to back them, how divergence and alignment impact trade and businesses, as well as why the government's negotiations with the EU, and its overall ambition to align more closely, are proving more difficult than anticipated.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone, welcome to the UK and a changing Europe podcast. And this week we're going to discuss
0:10.0	one of our favourite subjects at UK and a changing Europe, which is post-Brexit regulation, alignment,
0:15.6	divergence between the UK and the EU. And to do that, I am joined by another than, I was going to say UK and a changing Europe's, but the Institute for Governments and a little bit UK in a changing Europe's Jill Rutter. Hi, Anand. Hiya, Jill. And our very own Joelle, Roland, who as you all know, writes, our quarterly divergence tracker. Hi, Joel. Hi, Annette. All right. So I'm massively well prepared as normal.
0:39.4	So I'm just going to wing this a bit by saying I want to start off with a bit of the history,
0:44.9	which is the whole regulation thing was absolutely central to the sort of Eurosceptic vision
0:52.6	before the referendum, wasn't it? I mean, that was the Tory dream,
0:56.6	wasn't it?
0:57.4	Shall I start off on that? Because I're older.
0:59.5	Go back further than Joel does. So I think you're right. I mean, one of the very, very
1:07.3	long-standing bug bears of actually the entire political establishment at the UK was that
1:13.6	one of the consequences of our membership of the European Union was that the UK was forced
1:18.3	to accept lots of regulation that was driven by the needs of how many member states there were
1:25.4	at the time. Rather than UK's own needs. There was a
1:29.1	feeling that the EU, the EU bureaucrats, the people in Brussels, loved red tape. After all, it was
1:35.8	their raison d'etra to do all that. And then there was an additional feeling that once those
1:42.0	regulations came back to the UK, British bureaucrats got at them
1:47.0	and gold-plated them. So you had, if you like, this massive gold-plated red tape, EU in
1:53.0	origin. And the, you know, Brexite of vision was that the UK could do this much better,
2:00.0	have regulation that was much more tailored for UK needs.
2:04.0	I wouldn't be driven.
2:05.2	UK ministers in charge would not be driven by all this sort of, if you like, bureaucratic self-preservation project.
2:12.3	Of course, the origins of all that EU regulation were back in the creation of the single market, the need to ensure
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