Balance of Competences Review is not a full assessment of Britain's EU relationship

The much-ballyhooed Balance of Competences Review has just published its first set of reports and the lines have already been drawn between the In-at-all-costs camp and the Out-no-matter-whats. The former, jubilant at conclusions drawn by civil servants that EU competences across a number areas are just right, see fit to run around shouting ‘I told you so’ from the rafters. More hardened sceptics wearily remind them of their conviction from the outset that this was always going to be a technocratic sham of an exercise.

The reports are of course crowd-sourced, a collation of evidence. The conclusions, less so. One such conclusion counters the submissions criticising European red tape by maintaining that the process of regulation for SME’s is being ‘reversed at EU level’. It is a rather jaw-dropping justification – devoid of any specific detail – given that reversing anything is anathema to Brussels. And I am hardly surprised the judgement seems to be that problems with EU competences are less to do with the competence and more about teething problems in application and implementation.