Painful as it is for a Remain campaigner like me to admit, the EU has always been dire when it comes to policies for supporting innovation and technology. Even more painfully, things have worsened over the past ten years. Longstanding structural weaknesses in EU innovation policy date from well before the Brexit referendum in 2016. The European Union had dismally failed to create a regulatory environment conducive to technological innovation. As I found whenever I visited to Brussels as a No. 10 adviser under David Cameron, the policy instincts of European Commission officials were overwhelmingly rooted in market stability and risk avoidance – values that, while defensible in themselves, often produced unintended consequences for fast-moving sectors such as digital technology and life sciences. Take the EU’s data privacy rules, which were debated and developed for years before being finally implemented in 2018. As Cameron’s team repeatedly warned at the time, the compliance costs fell disproportionately on small and early-stage firms. Even before fines or litigation, the administrative burden for smaller organisations typically ran into tens of thousands of pounds.