Thread by @pmdfoster

So. How will the mechanisms to regulate fair competition in the new UK-EU trade pact land in the real world?

Here are two very opposing takes from two serious observers - my colleague @alanbeattie

ft.com/content/77bed4…

and Prof Damian Chalmers of @UKandEU. /1

https://twitter.com/ukandeu/status/1343936342439419910

The real differences seems to turn on how easy it will be for either party to show “material impact” from a subsidy or regulatory change in order to apply tariffs. @alanbeattie says hard, citing similar clauses in US deals that have proved toothless /2

While Prof Chalmers argues the impact test is actually very weak - weaker than the distortion test required to justify intra-EU regulation - and will result in EU policing U.K. sovereignty from Brussels /3

So as we prepare to set out on this journey into the unknown, two deeply different readings of where we are headed.

My guess is that much will depend on politics - will both sides want to let sleeping dogs lie, or will there be an endless series of confrontations? /4

Similarly with all the oversight committee set up to regulate the deal which @CSBarnard24 wrote on yesterday, raising Qs over how they’d be scrutinised outside Parliamentary oversight. Will they be a battlefield? Or just a forgotten corner of some foreign regulatory field? /5

I don’t know the answers to these Qs - they are much more about politics than policy methinks. You’d think it would go reasonably quiet...but then it may be hard, after 40 years to give up Brussels the Bogeyman. We’ll see. ENDS