EASA's goal is about raising safety standards to a common level in Europe
This is simply not true. The fact is that EASA's goal is about achieving a common level of safety standards in Europe that will involve some countries (mainly in the south) raising their standards and others (mainly in the north) lowering them. As with everything EU, it's all about 'one size fits all' which, of course, it never does.
Not quite true
I was at a meeting where it was made abundantly clear that
1) Despite its name, there is actually no part of EASA concerned with Safety.
2) EASA is a political organisation where most of the rules are constructed by lawyers working to a brief to bring standardisation (and nothing else) to the EU members.
These are the lawyers who insisted that for 'neatness' balloons would need to carry serviceable ASIs!
The default position is that when constructing rules, national exceptions are anathema, but they start from the premise that what the French do is the baseline. Only in exceptional circumstances will there be opt-outs.
The French get their Brevet de Base and Mountain Rating because they play it cleverly.
We don't get involved in the game and can't get even the simplest opt-out.
Once our leaders (whoever they may be) start to understand this and work with each other, we might start to get somewhere.
The way to guarantee failure is to sound off about how the UK does it better and safer than everyone else in Europe. Oh, and to send out our reps with no defined position helps to really screw things up.