The growth of the European nanny state undermines consumer choice. Regulatory overreach, which is accelerating in Brussels, contributed to Brexit and now fuels Euroskepticism elsewhere. Instead, Europe should safeguard personal freedoms.

In 2016, Britain shocked the world by voting for Brexit. The reasons were many, but EU leaders have failed to notice a key factor that fuels Euroscepticism: the nanny state. Brussels’ lifestyle restrictions and regulatory overreach are getting out of control.

When the Trumpian populist wave swept across Europe, most EU countries saw insurgent right-wing parties like Lega in Italy, AfD in Germany, and the National Rally in France. But in Britain, things were different—rather than a new electoral force emerging, we voted to quit the EU.

Why? According to the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign (and the government since 2016), Britain wanted to ‘take back control of our borders, money, and laws.' Borders and money are a bit more complicated; so far, Brexit may have cost Britain money in lost output (although estimates vary wildly), and the UK Home Office struggled to process asylum applications from people crossing the English Channel from France, causing a headache for successive prime ministers.

‘Taking back control’ of Britain’s laws, though, is more straightforward. For decades, British sovereignty has been flagrantly violated by Brussels making our laws for us, overruling our own elected government. After Brexit, thousands of EU laws were temporarily retained on the British statute book for continuity.

The government attempted to revoke them, although it ended up only changing a few. Such a radical overhaul had become necessary because the volume of superfluous EU laws has become overwhelming. To reform policy, the sensible approach is to scrap all these laws and start again.

Being an EU member state comes with big sacrifices, which some loyal supporters of the European project are blind to. Brussels has little respect for member states’ sovereignty. It frequently passes unneeded laws that undermine citizens’ most basic freedoms and offers no viable course to challenge the laws and reclaim those freedoms.

The disposable EU laws in the British statute book could fill a library. Often, new EU laws—especially on lifestyle issues—achieve nothing other than the growth of the nanny state. The Danish government, for example, was forced not long ago to slow down its investment in wind farms thanks to EU law. “I’m deeply frustrated,” said Lars Aagaard, Danish energy minister.

Often, these laws restrict consumer choice in the name of public health, but the true effect on the health of the population is negligible (or sometimes negative). There are countless well-known examples. For instance, the British government wanted to remove taxes on sanitary products, but that was banned by EU law, resulting in the much-hated ‘tampon tax’, which was finally scrapped after Brexit.

Meanwhile, an EU ban on iPhone chargers forces conformity in a fast-evolving industry, meaning Europeans don’t get to enjoy the same innovation as everyone else. Brussels hopes the law will reduce ‘e-waste’, but the EU’s own estimates predict it will save just 2.2 grams of waste per citizen.

The EU’s mandatory excise tax on tobacco products is likely to lead to a boom in the black market for cigarettes across Europe, as France has helpfully shown with its own domestic high tobacco taxes. Moreover, penalising key tools for quitting smoking like vaping won’t help achieve the EU’s long-term goal of creating a “tobacco-free generation.”

The EU has also banned halogen bulbs, despite French researchers warning that LEDs could be unsafe. The European Food Safety Authority said in 2011 that bottled water advertising should not claim that water helps prevent dehydration. The EU even has an opinion on the bendiness of our bananas—an EU law passed in 1994 restricted the sale of bananas with ‘abnormal curvature’.

The ‘bendy bananas’ law has become clichéd in Britain as an example of EU overreach. It is the subject of much heated debate. Brussels calls it a myth, although the law does exist, but that misses the point. Why was any bureaucrat in Brussels concerned to any extent with the shape of bananas being sold in Europe? Why does the EU feel the need to unilaterally ban iPhone chargers or enforce vaping taxes? We have national governments for that. The EU should be a trade block, not an all-powerful superstate.

Of course, now that Britain wants to wipe thousands of pages of these unnecessary laws from its statute book, there is plenty of scaremongering. Some say it will lead to disaster, but their warnings sound familiar. Those same pessimistic voices told us that by leaving the European Medicines Agency, Britain would be sluggish in approving and acquiring vaccines.

The reality was very different. Britain celebrated administering the world’s first ever Covid-19 vaccine in December 2020. By mid-February 2021, 19% of the British population had already received their first dose of the vaccine, compared to just 1.5% of the EU population. Meanwhile, EU countries had to stop administering doses because of shortages.

Britain is the only country that has left the EU, but as Brussels’ law-writing machine keeps churning out new taxes and regulations, Eurosceptic sentiment is growing across Europe. The European Parliament’s ‘Eurobarometer’ found in 2019 that across the EU, half of Europeans feel ‘things are not going in the right direction.’ Polling shows EU favorability has fallen recently in various countries such as France, Italy, Spain, and Slovakia. In France, the desire of voters to reject the ratification of the Constitution for Europe in 2005 was ignored.

This is not to say other countries should follow Britain and leave the EU—politics is rarely so simple—but Brussels’ penchant for taxing and regulating everything it sees, even against the wishes of its member states and their citizens, is accelerating. This hunger for power can only damage the EU in the long term. The exponential growth of the nanny state undermines the European project, as well as restricting adults’ ability to make lifestyle choices for themselves and often having counterproductive effects on public health through gratuitous centralised interventions.

Continuing down this road of nanny statism will make EU citizens poorer, less healthy, less safe, and—perhaps even more worryingly for Brussels—more sceptical of the European project. It is not too late to change course. Even if the EU does not yet have the appetite to revoke any of the laws it has written on behalf of its member states, it could at least slow down the writing of new unnecessary rules—for the sake of its own preservation, if nothing else.