If Boris Johnson’s recent reshuffle had an overarching purpose it was to show Conservative MPs that a beleaguered prime minister was listening to them. This is the perspective in which the most eye-catching ministerial move, the appointment of Jacob Rees-Mogg as minister for “Brexit opportunities”, should also primarily be seen. Mr Johnson wants his MPs to be reassured that his faith in Brexit is undiminished and that he has installed another ardent leaver at his side after the departure of Lord Frost.
What is less clear, though, is exactly what Mr Rees-Mogg is there to do. He has not simply taken over from Lord Frost, whose responsibility for negotiations with the EU was transferred to the foreign secretary, Liz Truss. But Mr Rees-Mogg’s extended job title gives a clue; in addition to his Brexit promotion role, he is also in charge of “government efficiency”. Mr Johnson is said to have told him to draft an action plan with “1,000 regulations we want to get rid of”.
What might these burdensome regulations actually be? On the Cabinet Office website, there is still a blank under the heading “Responsibilities”. On his first day in his new post, Mr Rees-Mogg was reduced to writing an article in the Sun in which he asked readers to suggest EU regulations that they would like to see abolished. But, in the same article, he made clear that his own view of “Brexit opportunities” is largely about economic and financial deregulation.
He wants, he wrote, to lead a drive to scrap “obsolete laws”, to diverge from EU rules, and to cut “the red tape that binds your hands”. This is familiar stuff from the referendum campaign. But in nearly six years since the vote it has proved a vacuous and dishonest approach to policy.
The reality of Brexit – in farming, fishing, road haulage, housebuilding, medicines and care homes among others, to say nothing of commercial links with Northern Ireland – has been more law, more rules and more red tape, not less. All derive from Mr Johnson’s desire to appease fanatics like Mr Rees-Mogg by leaving the free trading arrangements of the EU.
At the end of January, the government produced a glossy 105-page publication called The Benefits of Brexit. The report is full of inflated and unsubstantiated claims. It celebrates four categories of change as the clear benefits of Brexit which are in fact no such thing: some are changes which the UK could have made as an EU member; others are indeed a result of Brexit but are disadvantages; a third group are unlikely ever to be made for practical and competitive reasons; and there is a final category that, as Professor Stephen Weatherill of Oxford University puts it, offers “little more than pie in the sky”.
Mr Rees-Mogg’s own view of “Brexit opportunities” is deregulatory. His goal is to reduce legal controls on employers, markets and wealth. This is perhaps not surprising given that he is a major shareholder in an investment firm, Somerset Capital, which specialises in the emerging markets in which he is now tasked with finding “Brexit opportunities” for Britain.
But this is at odds with Mr Johnson’s commitments to levelling up and to higher levels of government spending. Mr Rees-Mogg’s appointment may primarily be aimed at stopping Conservative backbenchers from ousting the prime minister. But he could do a lot of serious social damage in this role too.
