I think it’s somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about “post-COVID” impacts when we’re probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally.
I was actually thinking that this is mostly normality—by “post-COVID” I meant “the world after COVID first shows up” rather than “the world after COVID goes away”. :)
seems to contrast with them going alone on pushing for herd immunity, in what was both in retrospect bad, and predictably so according to economists and epidemiologists who were shouting about it at the time.
Would this have gone any differently if they’d been in the EU? I’m mostly asking whether Brexit itself was a good idea, not whether the UK’s overall policies are good. (Though I guess a bunch of that other stuff is also relevant to evaluating Cummings’ track record! I guess I’d just want to note the change in scope.)
Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom.
What was Cummings’ stated reasoning? Googling around, the first source I could find explaining this was in this Economist interview:
BAGEHOT: Turning to the case for Brexit, what is it about the EU that you think makes it an inadequate form of governance and international co-operation in 2016, 2030, 2050?
DOMINIC CUMMINGS: In no order of priority… there is an obvious problem with democratic legitimacy (which the pro-EU people accept) if you have democratic accountability working at a national level, but a large and very important set of rules being set at a supranational level. People may accept that if they think that this new system is obviously much more effective and beneficial. But it isn’t. There are huge problems with how the EU system works. It is extraordinarily opaque, extraordinarily slow, extraordinarily bureaucratic, extraordinarily wasteful. And the advantages are very hard to quantify. I’ll give a specific example. Everyone holds up the Single Market as a wonderful thing without usually realising what it is. A rule brought in under the Single Market a decade or so ago was the Clinical Trials Directive. This regulates how the testing of drugs, including cancer drugs, operates in this country. There is no rationale whatsoever why, from the point of view of international trade, how a country organises the testing of cancer drugs should be an issue for supranational regulation.
BAGEHOT: It makes it easier to sell those drugs to a wider market of consumers.
DOMINIC CUMMINGS: No, it does not. In fact, what it has done is, as Nobel scientists and all sorts of people have said, massively slow down the process of testing and people have died unnecessarily as a result. The problem here is two-fold. It’s not just that the rule is stupid and in a rational world you wouldn’t have it. It’s that the process of changing it is almost impossible—and we still haven’t managed to do so. It’s been there now for over ten years. It is still causing trouble. The amended version comes into effect shortly. It still has all sorts of stupidities in it. Britain, left to its own devices, certainly would not do that. There’s a whole set of other examples. If two people sitting on a Shetland island want to sell olive oil to each other, the EU says they can’t sell it in containers of more than five litres. What on earth is the point of that? It’s totally pointless and saying “if we minus ourselves from rules like that, that’s somehow going to destroy jobs” is a non-sequitur. It does not follow on any sane view of economics.
This relates to a broader argument. If you look back on the long sweep of history, one of the big arguments about post-renaissance China and post-renaissance Europe concerns regulatory harmonisation. Post-renaissance China essentially harmonised the entire empire. Everyone had to do the same thing. In Europe we had a completely different system. We had regulatory competition so when, for example, the central Chinese government said “we’re not going to have any explorers, we’re going to get rid of our fleet”, that’s what happened. In Europe when explorers were told “we’re not going to fund you to go out and do that”, they went to another country and got funding from someone else.
This makes it sound to me like the vaccination case is a central example of the kind of thing Cummings wanted to change via Brexit.
First, I think that even understanding “post-covid” as now, it’s early to look at the overall impacts—and again, see the linked survey. Economists still think this was overall a mistake, from that perspective at least.
Second, as I said in a different response, the reasoning seems to be the claim that they wanted to take back, to slightly paraphrase from memory, “their money, their borders, and their laws”—and yes, laws definitely includes the sort of policy choice he’s pointing to, but it wouldn’t have needed to slow their early purchase nor their excellent distribution system (which would perhaps have been a couple weeks later due to the vaccine approval delay, which they likely could have pushed forward, but given how slowly they started to arrive, this would have made at most a small difference in vaccine timing for most people,) but the other two claims came first, and seemed like the central parts of the question.
I was actually thinking that this is mostly normality—by “post-COVID” I meant “the world after COVID first shows up” rather than “the world after COVID goes away”. :)
Would this have gone any differently if they’d been in the EU? I’m mostly asking whether Brexit itself was a good idea, not whether the UK’s overall policies are good. (Though I guess a bunch of that other stuff is also relevant to evaluating Cummings’ track record! I guess I’d just want to note the change in scope.)
What was Cummings’ stated reasoning? Googling around, the first source I could find explaining this was in this Economist interview:
This makes it sound to me like the vaccination case is a central example of the kind of thing Cummings wanted to change via Brexit.
First, I think that even understanding “post-covid” as now, it’s early to look at the overall impacts—and again, see the linked survey. Economists still think this was overall a mistake, from that perspective at least.
Second, as I said in a different response, the reasoning seems to be the claim that they wanted to take back, to slightly paraphrase from memory, “their money, their borders, and their laws”—and yes, laws definitely includes the sort of policy choice he’s pointing to, but it wouldn’t have needed to slow their early purchase nor their excellent distribution system (which would perhaps have been a couple weeks later due to the vaccine approval delay, which they likely could have pushed forward, but given how slowly they started to arrive, this would have made at most a small difference in vaccine timing for most people,) but the other two claims came first, and seemed like the central parts of the question.