"More than 50% of significant new regulations that impact on business in the UK now emanate from the EU"
About this Quote
"More than 50%" is doing the heavy lifting here: it sounds like a neutral statistic, but it’s engineered as a threshold argument. Once you clear the halfway mark, regulation stops feeling like domestic governance and starts reading as external rule-making. Hutton’s phrasing turns a technical pipeline ("emanate from") into a story about sovereignty and accountability, a quiet suggestion that British businesses are being shaped elsewhere, by people voters can’t easily reward or punish.
The line also smuggles in a framing choice about what counts as "significant" and what counts as "impact on business". Those are elastic categories, and that elasticity is the point: you don’t need to prove every rule is harmful to imply an accumulating burden. The quote doesn’t rage against regulation outright; it positions regulation as inevitable but contests who authors it. That’s a shrewd move in a UK debate where "red tape" rhetoric can backfire if it sounds like you’re attacking safety, worker rights, or environmental standards.
Context matters: for years, UK political and policy arguments about EU membership often pivoted on democratic deficit versus market access. This sentence is calibrated to speak to boardrooms and shop floors at once. It invites business leaders to see EU directives not as harmonization that lowers friction, but as upstream control that limits national flexibility. Its intent isn’t just to inform; it’s to prime a listener to ask the next question: if Brussels is the source, why are we pretending Westminster is in charge?
The line also smuggles in a framing choice about what counts as "significant" and what counts as "impact on business". Those are elastic categories, and that elasticity is the point: you don’t need to prove every rule is harmful to imply an accumulating burden. The quote doesn’t rage against regulation outright; it positions regulation as inevitable but contests who authors it. That’s a shrewd move in a UK debate where "red tape" rhetoric can backfire if it sounds like you’re attacking safety, worker rights, or environmental standards.
Context matters: for years, UK political and policy arguments about EU membership often pivoted on democratic deficit versus market access. This sentence is calibrated to speak to boardrooms and shop floors at once. It invites business leaders to see EU directives not as harmonization that lowers friction, but as upstream control that limits national flexibility. Its intent isn’t just to inform; it’s to prime a listener to ask the next question: if Brussels is the source, why are we pretending Westminster is in charge?
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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