Telegraph | Money | EU spells out trade threat from China

Way back in the day, when I was but a lowly grad student, I once wrote a paper discussing why the EU would eventually fail. I listed two main reasons:

1. The lack of a unified military to enforce political will outside the EU when diplomacy fails.
2. The manner in which the EU 'standardized' European products. For example, rather than have Turkey produce items to German specifications, the EU mandated that German specs were too rigid for many of the EU countries to fairly compete with: ergo, the German specs were lowered to Turkish standards.

It would appear that I can now add a 3rd reason: overbearing bureaucracy:

"The Commission blamed much of Europe's sluggish performance on suffocating red tape. It said the EU could raise overall GDP by 12pc through adopting an American-style "regulatory burden"."