&gt; No doubt we will be hearing much more of this in the UK over the next few months, given that EU rules have frequently been used as an excuse in a similar fashion.<p>Perhaps to some extent (and, being a citizen of neither the UK nor any other EU state, I really don&#x27;t have much invested in the Brexit debate), though the situation with the EU -- which has directly accountable organs and many of the same kinds of accountability and transparency provisions that are common in national government -- seems different (in general, more like the US federal&#x2F;state situation, where overlapping powers mean that there are multiple levels at which an interested party can attempt to achieve the same kind of goal and the can, to an extent, forum-shop for the most friendly authority, but still be subject to the same general type of exposure through the legislative process, even if the details are different at different levels.)<p>There&#x27;s probably also an argument that <i>without</i> the EU, <i>more</i> of Britain&#x27;s affairs would be subject to topic-specific, specially-negotiated-through-opaque-process, deals.