"Why are you making it sound like the issue is binary?"

Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself.

A bit of a motte-and-bailey. Some of them are undoubtedly good, some less so, and we shouldn't lobotomize ourselves by immediately dragging slavery out when starting discussions about the current regulatory level.

"Were those authorities doing the inspection from the EU or the local nation?"

EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.

It is very different from the US where state authorities aren't tasked by enforcing federal regulations, because the Feds have their own enforcement infrastructure.

Compared to the US, EU-own enforcement infrastructure is tiny and mostly outsourced to local governments.

>Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself.

I didn't mean it to be absolutist. But then riddle me this, if the EU regulations are the problem holding us back, why not get rid of some of them to boosts domestic production, and instead kneecap our agriculture industry with regulations and make ourselves dependent on imports from potential adversaries who don't follow our regulations?

Because I don't see the logic behind this being an advantage for us. It makes the EU incompetent at best, or malicious at workst.

>EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.

Yeah but enforcement is still local. A lot of countries choose to be very lax with enforcing some EU laws if the laws are stupid and nobody's getting hurt. So ultimately it's still the fault of the local nation for being overly pedantic with enforcement.

Blaming EU laws for local issues, is the ultimate cope the UK also tried, and once they left the EU, their problems persisted, because guess what, their issues were all domestically inflicted by local politics and not coming from the EU as they claimed.