Explainer: The Brexit bonfire of EU laws turns into dust
Rishi Sunak has smothered the “Brexit bonfire” of EU laws – and hard-line Brexiteers are fuming with rage. But the prime minister smartly refused to be the face of this u-turn, putting business secretary Kemi Badenoch on the front stage herself.
This week, Badenoch had to tell Brexiteers in her party that the majority of EU regulations that were meant to be scrapped will stay on the statute book. Of almost 4,000 pieces of retained legislation, around 800 should be removed by the end of 2023.
The “red tape”, as Brexiteers like to call it, was to be scrapped as part of the Retained EU Law Bill, which Rishi Sunak backed back in January. The Bill would have abolished all the 4,000 laws by the end of this year – something many civil servants and business people had always said was absolutely unachievable and reckless.
Are we surprised? Not really. Brexit was always sold as an epic mission to “gain back control” – but the idea of scrapping most EU laws was always unfeasible. These laws govern the way the UK trades, does business, fosters innovation and invests in research among many other things, and have made up the fabric of the way the country functions for a long time. Simply thinking you could scrap them with a quick fix was always little more than a freebie for the hard right.
The real consequences of getting rid of legislation too quickly were shown in pictures that we now know by heart of lorry queues at Dover and drivers protesting angrily. A government is not a startup, and its motto for post-Brexit policy should be “handle with care”, not “move fast and break things” à la Mark Zuckerberg.
As you’d expect, hard-line Tories briefed the papers (anonymously) to show their rage and their sense of betrayal. Badenoch got all the blame – being described by her fellow MPs as weak.
She’s to the right of the party on most issues, including Brexit, so she probably didn’t love the task. Yet she was able to make the argument that the government is being practical and that scrapping a high number of laws by the end of this year would have brought a lot of uncertainty for businesses.
Yet saying that 800 pieces of legislation will be removed in the next eight months – but not which ones – doesn’t give a lot of certainty to businesses either. The whole saga is likely to look like a big, exhausting mess by the end of it – much like most of the post-Brexit issues.