Brexit was sold to voters seven years ago on the basis it would be the answer to myriad problems. It would address Britain’s laggardly growth by putting rocket boosters under the economy. It would free up money to spend on an underfunded NHS. It would boost wages in low-paid jobs by reducing immigration levels. And it would reinvigorate our parliamentary democracy by returning sovereignty to Westminster.
None of this was ever going to materialise and recent years have only served to underline just how false these promises were. Last week, the government finally put to bed the idea it is feasible to scrap thousands of retained EU regulations in one swoop when Kemi Badenoch junked the profoundly undemocratic sunset clause in the retained EU law bill.
This bill was introduced by Jacob Rees-Mogg during Liz Truss’s premiership. It would have automatically revoked all EU regulations that were converted into domestic law at the end of the Brexit transition period at the end of this year, save those specifically exempted by ministers.
It is a totally unworkable piece of legislation. The government has not even been able to produce a comprehensive list of regulations that it covers; even the total number of 4,000 it is assumed it would apply to is just an estimate. The time allowed by the government – just a few months – to review and recodify huge swathes of domestic legislation, covering areas as diverse as employment rights, consumer protections and the environment, was completely unrealistic. The bill also gives huge discretionary powers to ministers to make changes to the law without any parliamentary oversight or consultation with the businesses, organisations and people whose lives could be deeply affected by them. The verdict of one eminent King’s Counsel is it would violate key constitutional principles in the UK, including the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, separation of powers and the rule of law, by “transferring parliament’s essential role, law-making, into the hands of ministers”.
Put simply, it would enable ministers to make sweeping changes to the laws that affect people’s everyday lives – like how much paid holiday they are entitled to, or minimum air quality standards – with absolutely no democratic scrutiny at all. It certainly does not increase parliamentary sovereignty as the government has claimed and as Brexit was meant to do; rather, it represents a massive power grab by ministers. It has also created huge legislative uncertainty for businesses who could not know what regulations would apply in a few months’ time.
The scrapping of the sunset clause means retained EU legislation will be preserved unless ministers actively revoke it. But the bill would still enable the government to amend the law with no parliamentary scrutiny and end the “supremacy” of EU law by encouraging the courts not to take into account precedent from court judgments based on EU law. The Law Society says this would “compromise the legal clarity and certainty businesses and individuals rely on”.
This false claim – that the government is restoring parliamentary sovereignty while it is actually driving this key constitutional principle into the ground – is just the latest in a long line of lies Conservative politicians have fed voters about Brexit. It started with the Vote Leave campaign: the claim that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week for the NHS that has been ruled a “clear misuse of official statistics” by the UK Statistics Authority, and the suggestion that staying in the EU would mean Britain would be set to share a border with Syria and Iraq. It continued under Boris Johnson’s premiership, with his false statement that the Northern Ireland protocol he had negotiated would involve no customs checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Dishonesty runs through every aspect of the Brexit pitch because the honest case for the ideological pet project of the Tory right is so unappealing that voters would never have endorsed it.
Now the Conservative party is starting to pay the political price. Getting Brexit done was the slogan that handed a handsome parliamentary majority to Boris Johnson in 2019, but it no longer has the political salience it once did with voters. The local election results show they are more than willing to punish them for the consequences. People are experiencing a toxic mix of high inflation, rising interest rates and stagnating wages: some of that is due to global factors, but the UK’s new status as a growth laggard is the main outcome of Brexit. Meanwhile, NHS waiting lists are at record highs and patients are being treated in dilapidated buildings.
The populist pretence that leaving the EU was the magic fix for all the country’s woes has had terrible consequences. It has made us all poorer, absorbed huge amounts of diplomatic capital in attempts to resolve the issues it created in Northern Ireland, and cheapened our politics by normalising the spread of misinformation by those who should know better. It has also exposed the Conservative party as divided and lacking any coherent sense of mission.
Little wonder that opinion polls show that most people think Brexit was a bad idea. But the clock cannot be turned back; this once-in-a-generation decision will haunt us for decades to come.
