I understand my hon. Friend’s argument, but—if I may say so—I think that he oversells his case. It is true that we can have European regulation, just as we can at national level, that is overly prescriptive,
overly complicated and far too costly as far as business is concerned. Therefore, one of the tests that we have in mind when judging Commission proposals is whether in the first place the introduction of a single regulatory regime to govern a European single market would produce a net benefit for business, compared with the 28 different national regimes that would be eliminated as a consequence of a single European regulatory framework. Also, Ministers in this Government have argued repeatedly that we think the Commission could make more use of the principle of mutual recognition, which after all was made clear in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice some decades ago in the Cassis de Dijon case, rather than relying all the time on the detailed harmonisation of national arrangements, which can easily lead one into the sort of overly complicated system that my hon. Friend fears.