Ditching crazy EU retained law bill a sensible decision

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers

Think back to the craziness of the Conservative leadership race last summer and remember how desperate the candidates were for the votes of Tory MPs and the relatively small group of Conservative party members who got to decide.

It was a feverish period, and for those of us without a vote on picking the next PM a rather frightening and disorientating experience.

The candidates seeking votes from a very small electorate may have been behaving rationally in terms of their own self-interest when they made promises. But as they scrambled for support they made pledges and were forced to adopt positions that were less than sensible. This sometimes happens in a democracy, not just in the UK. Indeed, it is one of the oldest dilemmas in politics and human affairs. Is the candidate making an unwise promise or two justified by what he or she perceives to be the greater good of them winning and taking charge?

The main unwise promise, although there were others, to emerge from the Tory arms race was the Retained EU Law Bill. This is the “sunset” legislation to axe around 4,000 EU laws at the end of this year that still apply in Britain after Brexit. It had begun life as an idea under Boris Johnson, when it was described as the “Brexit Freedoms Bill“.

As the Law Society explains: “Retained EU law is a concept created by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. This act took a ‘snapshot’ of EU law as it applied to the UK at the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020 and provided for it to continue to apply in domestic law.”

The REUL legislation would remove those laws. The Law Society has warned of the chaos for business that would result.

The chief proponent of the measure, Jacob Rees-Mogg, introduced the legislation in September during the Truss interregnum. Both Truss and Rishi Sunak had committed themselves to the REUL manoeuvre during the leadership contest to appeal to more hardline Brexiteers who wanted all EU law wiped away in one go.

It is this parliamentary bill that the government in effect scrapped, or diluted, this week. The Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch announced sensibly that rather than whacking 4,000 laws in one go, the government will instead identify around 800 laws to be removed. After that, parliament can take its time.

There then followed numerous explosions in response from the hardline Brexiteer wing of the Tory party. Badenoch and Sunak were selling out Brexit, it was said.

To a minor extent I was caught up in the fallout myself as an observer when I disagreed with the hardliners. After tweeting on Thursday that the original bill was mad, ill-conceived legislation, and the government was right to ditch it, I was invited on to Channel 4 News. The host Cathy Newman asked me whether as a Brexiteer I felt betrayed.

No, not at all, I explained. In recent months business and science has been saying, in tones of increasing desperation and panic, that the legislation was dangerous, because if implemented it would create all manner of uncertainty and confusion about which laws, and regulations, apply where in hundreds of areas.

This is no way for a country to make its laws, just sweeping away thousands of laws accumulated over decades because they have the taint of the EU.

Sometimes those laws will have been instigated by the British when we were members of the EU, and then gold-plated later by Westminster and Whitehall. In other cases it will be law that might at some point conflict if changed with elements of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (the deal with the EU that is automatically reviewed every five years). Or there might be laws that are so well-established and taken for granted by business or consumers that it makes sense to retain or refine them. Or there’s stuff to ditch if there is a clear benefit.

Unscrambling this and working out what we need as a country is bound to be difficult, tedious, time-consuming work, contrary to the claims of several Brexit-ultra lawyers and sovereignty hardliners on social media and GB News who say it is simple. They have volunteered to stay up past their bedtimes every night until December 31st reading the 4,000 laws and deciding whether they go in the bin.

This would be a suboptimal way for Britain to make law, when we’ve left the EU and have our own parliament.

As the veteran Tory MP and Brexiteer David Davis has been saying for months, one of the main purposes of Brexit was supposed to be the return of democratic oversight to the UK’s parliament. The REUL Bill in its original form gave ministers too much power to axe laws. As Davis says, if it takes a year, or ten years, or fifty years, to go through these laws and work out what is needed, what should be amended or tweaked, and what should be scrapped, then so be it.

In the end, the government had little choice other than to dilute the bill. In the House of Lords it was facing opposition. Hardliners like to dismiss this as Remainers (the contemporary Jacobites) blocking Brexit. Perhaps there’s some of that. It is not the whole picture though. More than one pro-Brexit peer has admitted to me they thought the bill so reckless they would have to oppose the government in public. In the Commons there has been disquiet too. The bill in its first phases sailed through last autumn in part because the inmates of Westminster were so stunned by the ongoing drama – the Truss tenure, the mini-Budget crisis, the death of the late Queen, the switch to Sunak – that it just happened when people weren’t thinking straight. Jacob Rees-Mogg got his bill.

The response this week of hardliners to the inevitable and welcome Sunak-Badenoch u-turn has been hugely depressing, if not surprising.

Assorted members of the ERG, the European Research Group, said they were mystified as to why the government had done it.

Really? It’s not mysterious. The bill was a reckless mess.

Other views on this subject are available. An eminent lawyer I ran into at a drinks party last week explained politely that he thought the government has got it completely wrong by retreating. Wash every stain of the EU out of our laws, he said. Our governing class has missed the bigger picture, something to do with common law, he said. We should not have anything at all to do with European law or American law. Stand apart, be completely distinct in all regards, make that our selling point, he said.

While I can see the purifying appeal with this theory, the problem is that it is not a reality-based approach when law, politics, international treaties, global standards and geopolitics all overlap in complex ways that require a little pragmatism. Sometimes it will make sense to have similar laws to those of our nearest neighbours and trading partners, in other areas there is economic opportunity aplenty in being distinct.

Personally? I cannot see there is much point in having wildly divergent rules on the manufacture of domestic goods for example. It seems unlikely there is much of a market for deregulated British washing machines with different or looser safety and environmental standards. If someone was to attempt to make such a product I doubt they or we as a country would prosper.

On financial services it is different. The very last thing the UK and the City of London should do is align with the European Union. The City is a global financial centre drawing on deep, global capital markets. The EU has several important financial centres, but nothing equivalent to the City or New York and no prospect of unifying its fragmented capital markets. The UK and the City must control their own destiny while cooperating and competing as an equal with other players.

This is recognised by the Bank of England and the Treasury. There has been a debate recently over whether the rules imposed on banks in the UK by the regulators has been too stringent. It is said the EU’s rules are now, ironically, less stringent on banks. Then the US regional banking crisis happened and the collapse of Credit Suisse. Perhaps British caution was justified. We’ll see in the next phase of the banking emergency if it ripples across Europe. Either way, it is better we have our own debate on all this reflecting our own circumstances.

The response of the true believers to the junking of much of the REUL Bill suggests they are not going to be much interested in subtlety or compromise at any point in the future. This has now become a belief system. An MP told her followers on Twitter this week that “the British people” had voted for the REUL because a majority voted for Brexit. This is nonsense. I voted for Brexit and hardliners don’t get to count my vote as being an endorsement of a bad bill created amid the craziness of the 2022 Tory leadership contest.

Brexit has hardened (as Remain did at the other end of the spectrum) into an almost religious conviction, requiring cult-like devotion and declarations that those who raise practical doubts are heretics who do not believe with sufficient passion.

After everything that has happened in the Brexit civil wars, we are surely way beyond the point where blithe assurances from some of my fellow Brexiteers – just sweep it all away, it’ll all be fine – are any kind of basis for making sound national policy.

Now we’re out of the EU it turns out to be more complicated than the campaign slogans, with some downsides and trade offs, and some opportunities on the economy, defence and geopolitics, if we conduct our national affairs in a sensible, rational way.

Ten days until London Defence Conference 2023

Next week we announce the programme for the London Defence Conference 2023, taking place at King’s College London in partnership with the School of Security Studies 23-24 May.

This is the new, annual, defence, security and geopolitical gathering held in the heart of London at Bush House, hosting policymakers, academia, industry and media. It is by invitation only.

A huge effort has gone into this event from the London Defence Conference team and our supporters. They have put together an exciting line-up of speakers and panelists and we can’t wait to get started.

You can read more about the Conference at www.londondefenceconference.com

Taking the long way home

Having moved for the summer to Hove on the south coast, I’m learning fast how long the commute really takes.

And yet, there are advantages. On a Thursday evening, if it is impossible with rail strikes to get into London as it was this week, three days by the sea open up. Time slows, the air is cleaner and sleep deeper.

There is also a pleasant contrast with the London “stop start” commute. On a line into town from south west London a journey is measured in two or three minute bursts, with the train stopping at a station and a new set of stressed or grumpy people getting on board and trying to find a seat. It is a disjointed, distracting journey that makes proper relaxation or reflection impossible.

On the fastest train in from Brighton there are only two stops on the way. When the service works it zips along over the south downs and through some deep English countryside. The familiar, relaxing rhythms of rail travel take their effect. It is feasible to write, or think calmly, or listen in an old-fashioned style to a complete album or most of a symphony while looking out the window and reflecting.

I will hold on to this nice thought when I get stuck outside Haywards Heath at 11pm, when there is a rail replacement bus service and no available taxi within twenty miles.

What I’m reading

As much as I can, before novels written by humans and published in printed form are disappeared by the internet, AI and the changing tastes of younger generations. In a weekend essay for The Times James Marriott talked to students and academics in a bid to explain the dramatic decline of English literature as a degree subject outside Oxford and Cambridge. As undergraduates loaded by their elders with ridiculous debts prioritise subjects they hope (good luck) will make them employable in the age of AI, the humanities are in rapid retreat. In English, the politicisation of the field, and the pious concentration on cancellation, guilt and decolonisation, renders dreary even something as exciting as a good novel featuring complex characters.

This month I’m reading the Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh’s wartime masterpiece, for at least the fifth time, and wondering how on earth it can be that anyone would favour TV box-set bingeing on a streaming service over Waugh or Dickens on the page. And then I realise it’s a simple question of sensory overload. The machines the tech giants have built pump out shiny, enticing product that is endless. We find it too hypnotising, relaxing, easy and alluring. The machines are winning and they’ve barely started. I’m even writing this on a sodding mobile telephone via the internet.

The irony, as James Marriott says, is that the deeper we get sucked into this tech-driven world of simulation and stimulation, the more we are going to need great literature or history precisely because these works explore what it is to be human, to be different from the machines, and what it meant to our predecessors to live.