There is a particular kind of political folly that manages to be simultaneously expensive, unnecessary and self-inflicted. The U.K. government’s proposed dynamic alignment with European Union (EU) Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulations is a masterclass in all three.

I have spent the better part of three decades watching governments make avoidable economic mistakes. I watched Congress nearly talk itself out of the 2017 tax cuts. I watched the EU spend twenty years writing regulations that the Draghi Report eventually confirmed had driven European labor productivity from 95% of U.S. levels down to below 80%. Bad policy has a recognizable shape, and this has it.

Let’s be precise about what “dynamic alignment” actually means, because the phrase has been polished to a bureaucratic sheen that disguises its content. It does not mean cooperating with the EU. It does not mean recognizing each other’s standards. It means the U.K. automatically adopts whatever regulations Brussels writes, as Brussels writes them, with no vote in Westminster, no domestic scientific review and no meaningful power to say no.

Norway has held formal consultation rights in EU regulatory discussions for thirty years. It has never once successfully blocked a measure it opposed. The U.K. is now proposing to pay for the same privilege.

The Growth Commission, an independent body of economists and former senior policymakers, has calculated the net cost at £15 billion, half a percent of GDP, and that figure is conservative. It captures what alignment will cost. It cannot capture what the U.K. will fail to become: an economy that kept its........

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