Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
Immigration policy openness — work visas, family reunification, asylum processing, border enforcement posture.
Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.
The UK's post-Brexit regulatory-divergence programme, framed by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023, established the legal machinery for the UK to depart from inherited EU rules across financial services (Edinburgh Reforms), agriculture, chemicals (UK REACH), data protection, and product safety. The intended effect was to allow tailored UK-specific regulation, capture potential growth dividends from divergence, and signal regulatory sovereignty — even at the cost of border friction in goods trade with the EU and a reduction in deep regulatory market access.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.