Josie Appleton is the director of the Manifesto Club.






*****



You might think that you’re not familiar with the CE symbol, but you probably are, I’m sure you’ve seen it thousands of times. I can’t show you a picture of it in audio format, but the symbol is two semi-circles, the first one making a C, the second with an extra line to make the capital E, and CE stands for, conformité européenne meaning conformity with European standards, and you’ve seen and ignored that symbol on a thousand different products, electronics, toys, basically any manufactured consumer product.



I mentioned cycle helmets on the podcast a few weeks back, that they are designed to protect a cyclist from a fall to the ground, but not from being hit by the driver of a car. Those design standards are codified in the conformité européenne system, and you’re not allowed to make, import or sell any products in the EU that don’t meet those standards.







The products are inspected, when they pass they get to display that CE symbol, the consumer doesn’t get children’s toys covered in lead paint or, hopefully, mobile phone batteries that blow up.



It is true that regulations like this have the potential include malicious requirements that some country sneaks in, to try to favour their industry over another country. James Dyson, for example, complained that the ratings for vacuum cleaners were done in a way that disadvantaged his invention, but the regulations are agreed by the EU as a whole, and everyone gets their shpake.



Official CE logo


The regulations are necessarily very complex, because they cover thousands of different products, and they can be very technical, and they were one of the prime rhetorical targets of the Brexit campaign, including people like James Dyson, you probably know this script by heart, the Brussels bureaucrats tying up our business up in unnecessary red tape.



This is Brexit, the Movie a glossy, professionally-produced video put out on YouTube by right-wing film-maker Martin Durkin as part of the Brexit campaign, it’s typical of the rhetoric at the time.



It’s very typical of the Brexit campaign in the sense that Martin Durkin has no regard for the truth, in this segment all the things that are mentioned in the voiceover appear in the stylishly-filmed routine of ‘regulated man’ getting up and having breakfast, with nifty graphics listing all the relevant regulations over each item. Except, they’re not necessarily relevant, as John Oliver observed at the time.



It’s not explicitly mentioned in Brexit the Movie, but most of the regulation that they were talking about here are the CE regulations, and ‘freeing Britain’ from this burdensome regulation was a core objective, and a core selling point of the Brexit lobby.



So, after much delay, what was called the UKCA, standing for UK Conformity Assessed, UKCA was launched on 1 January 2021, with the validity of CE certification to expire in the UK as of 31 December 2021, so a one-year transition period. Basically, the British government created their own standards agency to set their own standards independently,