No, because the trouble with EU standards is they are also laws. You have to comply. The nice thing about standards is that there ought to be many to choose from, so if you think it behoves you to use the most popular one then go for it, but if you have some special reason to choose a lesser known standard, or your own standard (many industries evolve their own standard through natural evolution) you ought to be able to do so. If banana growers or supermarkets think there is utility in a bendy banana standard then let them write it, don't spend public money having some eurocrat do it.
The EU uses standards not so much to improve efficiency or utility but as protection against foreign competitors, which has the corollary effect of choking native competition too. Sure, some products benefit from an enforced continental (or even global) standard, but not nearly as many as are currently the case . Forcing everyone to adopt a one-size-doesn't-fit-all standard, in most cases, increases prices for nearly everyone by reducing competition and innovation, and therefore improvement and choice.
The other problem with government -especially EU- standard is proliferation. When it's your cushy government job to write standards you will keep doing it whether those standards are helpful or asked for. Hence we have thousands of pointless EU standards for the most mundane of items, with new ones every day. Sure make a case for drug, food, water standards, but toasters? Pillows? Pencil erasers?
No, you are erecting the usual internet strawman that the only possibilities are "what we have now" or "absolutely nothing at all" with nothing inbetween allowed. I argue for fewer standards, not none, or standards that are more voluntary -at the risk of company reputation- rather than enforced, or standards that are arrived at by industry not politicians. Government standards always emerge after the fact; after things have gone wrong and everyone is already aware (think asbestos). (Victorian food adulteration applied mainly to corn/flour since the price was set artificially high by the gov't corn laws, and the loaf law that made it illegal to bake anything other than 14oz . Corn law was repealed in 1845 and food instantly improved. The food adulteration regulations didn't come until 1860 by which time the problem was virtually moot).
Quality assurance comes at cost. Surely, it is better to have a more competitive and less regulated marketplace where consumers can choose whether to pay additional costs to guarantee quality, and where market innovations find more effective ways of policing quality? If I want a quality tool I expect to pay a lot. But I wouldn't like to have the option of pound-shop throw-away tools taken away from me.
