Sorry found it
Glad you found it, you almost wrote out the setting name in your topic title 
redactor.pastePlainText
actually - I have it set to yes, but it is still pasting in br, p and a tags…
The setting should get rid of formatting (headers, bolds etc), resulting in simple, clean paragraphs. Perhaps “paste as plain text” is not a 100% accurate name of what it’s doing as it does indeed leave some markup, but it does sound to me like the expected behaviour for it to at least leave paragraphs…