Boris' brilliant idea

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It might, of course, just have been some sort of strange Old Etonian dare that the PM was set by his old school chums.  Getting someone to tell porkie pies about real, actual pork pies sounds like the sort of jolly prank that I can imagine them playing on each other for their own amusement.  Whether much else of what he said in his criticism of US rules which keep UK products out of the American market was true or false is unclear, but given the source, it’s probably safer to assume that it was mostly invented.

He did make one interesting point though, when referring to the ‘fact’ (in quotes because I simply don’t know whether it is true or not, but let’s run with it for the moment) that a UK company wanting to sell insurance into the US has to deal with 50 different regulators rather than just one or two.  In essence, he may have hit on a brilliant idea here – rather than a group of states each having their own sets of rules and regulations, they could band together and agree a common set of rules which would make trade between groups of states potentially much easier.  Perhaps the countries of Europe could take up the idea as well.  We could call it, oh, I don’t know, how about something along the lines of a single European market?  Then, with a large and homogeneous ‘home’ market, it would become easier to sell our wares into other large homogeneous markets with fewer regulatory bodies needing to be involved.  I can’t imagine why no-one has thought of this before.