I'm assuming Mick was an adherent to the Lexit idea, one which didn't get much of a hearing.
Summarising it briefly, there's a lot of EU rules that those on the further reaches of the left object to, such as state aid, competitive bidding, domestic bias, patent recognition, open market access, balance of powers, etc...
China illustrates this quite nicely, it used to be almost impossible to set up independently in China if you were a foreign company. And if you did, god help you.
Cause the courts wouldn't.
The Communist party appoints judges.
This is a problem, especially if you want to be a Wholly Foreign Owned Entity (WFOE) which is competing against a State Owned Entity (SOE) or Joint Venture (JV) between a domestic, communist party controlled company and a foreign company.
Because of course, they can sue you off the pitch quite easily. The laws are frequently written so they are highly open to interpretation. An SOE or JV wants to put a WFOE out of business?
Easy, bring a case to court and get your judge friend in the communist party to rule for you. Happens all the time. Until a few years ago, Chinese judges barely had to be qualified to practice law.
So as a foreign company, you think "Great, joint venture". You find a Chinese joint venture partner to do business with.
Do you have Intellectual Property? Great, now your joint venture partner has it. And they have just set up a parallel division to compete with you.
Have a problem with that? You could always try suing them....
This approach massively helped China advance. It's hard to understate how big a factor this was in getting China up to speed technologically.
The EU forbids shenanigans like that. Which many of those on the left think is ridiculous, you should be able to massively bias for your own companies, look after your own.
State subsidies and infant industry support are others where the EU has structures built to prevent it (albeit with loopholes).
Say you wanted to create a domestic industry building motorbikes. You could just ban the importation of motorbikes, forcing everyone in your country to buy whatever bikes get produced domestically. And then subsidise the export of those motorbikes abroad. They might be crap, but in a few years time they'll be competitive.
And eventually, you get fairly good at making motorbikes, and because you're subsidising them, they sell very well internationally. Suddenly, you have an industry that employs lots of people and, if you're lucky, becomes profitable.
Europe had a problem in the post war era where lots of countries tried this. If all of your competing countries are trying to do it, it fails miserable, the vast majority of the money spent is completely wasted*.
But if your competing countries aren't allowed to do it because of EU rules and you're allowed to undermine private companies with state funding, you can do VERY well with this strategy, putting a lot of dirty capitalists out of business.
Once again, China did this very well.
There's a good book that at least explains the ideas behind this by Ha Joon Chang:
Buy Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (Anthem World History) by Chang, Ha-Joon (ISBN: 8601200730739) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.
www.amazon.co.uk
I don't think these ideas are given half as much time as they deserve as most of them were written off in the 70s, but China has clearly demonstrated they're worth looking at again. And the EU is structurally built to block any large scale attempts to replicate them outside of the defence industry (where it's rampant, c.f. US military spending)
*This again is an arguable point with the left because while it's not making an immediate profit, it's providing well paid, respectable work for the workforce and potentially the multiplier effects pay off. It's very, very messy economically.
