Thank God for Brexit

As we’re coming up to a decade since Liberation Day, an important question is, did Brexit work? Given that the aim of Brexit was to be outside the European Union, we are outside the European Union, Brexit worked — QED. 

And yes, I do know, I was there, did my little pipsqueak of an effort to make it happen. The aim was to leave the EU, and we have — job done.

Now, why it was right to leave the EU is another question — but my own insistence is that it’s to be free of an idiotic bureaucracy. I’ve used the example of allowable jam flavours here before. It’s not — it really isn’t — that apricot marmalade is either legal or illegal — it’s the insanity of a regulatory system that thinks the allowability, or otherwise, of apricot marmalade is something to be decided by a multinational bureaucracy, rather than by people deciding what to spread on their own toast. We can now up the absurdity of the example a bit with the new regulations on product packaging. 

The new rules are here. “Regulation (EU) 2025/40 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 December 2024 on packaging and packaging waste” — new as in they start coming into force now and progressively get tighter over time. As ever there is the usual absurdity: “Items that are packaging — Cake doilies sold with a cake.” This is packaging to be subject to all the following rules about packaging. Cake doilies not sold with a cake are free of all of those rules and regs. I’m opening a doilies shop that will be sold with a free slice of cake in 3 … 2… 1…

“Mascara brush which forms part of the container closure …” I have not done drag all that often but that is how I recall most of the stuff arrives. Of special interest to us Brits: “‘packaging’ means ….a permeable tea, coffee or other beverage bag”. Yep. Teabags. Pan-European regulations on how used teabags are to be recycled. As opposed to the process in my student days of reuse until final failure.

I must repeat that this is simply insane. Planning at this level of detail for 500 million people simply is insane. Thus, we are well-off — better off — out of it. For if people are going to bureaucratically mimsy their way to this level of detail then we need — to preserve any remnant of a free society — to be well clear of it. 

But enough of the tragic detail and on to whimsy. The aim and point of these recycling regulations is to save precious resources. If we merely use stuff then throw it away, then that’s resources being abandoned to the fury of Gaia. This is — as so often with environmental politics — simply wrong. 

Yes, obviously, we should save resources. Anyone who has — as I have — recycled cut offs from Soviet nuclear power plants into go faster wheels for boy racers grasps that. Something that’s worth money should not be left lying around — it should be moved on for profit. I made a house’s worth of money off that little escapade. 

I also didn’t waste it by buying a house, I drank it. It’s that existence of the profit that tells us that we should be doing that reuse, recycling, of those resources. We are adding value — that profit is, by definition, the value added — by doing so and adding value is the entire point of an economy. 

Equally obviously, we should not be trying to lose money — reduce the value added in the economy — by reusing, recycling, things that use up more resources than are saved by our doing so. Because that’s the very antithesis of what we’re trying to do in an economy. So, we should recycle where it adds value, not recycle where it doesn’t.

Another way of making much the same point is that packaging itself — of plastics, metals, any physical asset — is not the thing to be saved. It is economic resources that are to be saved. This includes things like packaging, of course — and metals, and plastics — but also human labour, capital, transport costs and on and on. We want to optimise our use of all resources, not just the one. Fortunately, we have a way of measuring this. In a market economy — something we still have despite the efforts of so many to destroy it — the value of anything in an alternative use is its price. This means we can just look at the profit to be made by doing a thing and see whether it is saving resources. A loss means we are gaining less, at the end, than the alternative use of all those resources necessary to do the thing.  

This is the very lesson being ignored by these detailed regulations. If recycling packaging meant a saving of resources then recycling packaging would make a profit at which point detailed regulations would not be necessary. We’d have every rag and bone man hauling the horse around to offer us cash for our waste. That no one will offer us cash is proof that the waste is worth less than nothing. Thus, the existence of these detailed regulations about how we must, anyway, is just proof that the bureaucracy is conspiring to make us all poorer. 

True, we’ve still got our domestic morons to deal with but we can do this with elections

This is even admitted in the regulations themselves: “Minimum recycled content in plastic packaging”. The correct way to read this is that no bugger wants recycled plastic. It’s a resource sink — it loses money. So, therefore, we’re going to insist, by law, that everyone use this thing that has no value so that it has some value and we can pretend that our regulations are not merely value destruction as a form of bureaucratic worship of Gaia. 

At which point, yes, Brexit has worked, hasn’t it? We’re out. These loons no longer rule us. Job’s  a good ‘un. 

True, we’ve still got our domestic morons to deal with but we can do this with elections that actually change policy. This is something that doesn’t happen in the EU, as whoever gets elected to the EU Parliament doesn’t have any influence over what policy is. It’s not even allowed — no, really — to propose policy.   

One final point. A decade back the EU insisted that olive oil, served at the table, must be in single serve bottles and sachets. Because, something. Today the same EU is insisting that sauces, ketchups and the like, must not be in single serve sachets. Because something. I have read the latest insistence and it doesn’t tell us whether this overturns the olive oil thing or that this still stands because olive oil is speshul.

No, we’re better off out. Which is why Brexit worked. We are out. That we’ve still domestic work to do is true but at least we’re able to do it. Which is why it has all worked.