Friday 30 December 2022

The REUL Bill - a red herring

The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill is starting to achieve a bit of public awareness, certainly on Twitter. This is the law intended to sweep away any last vestige of EU law from the UK's statute book, essentially by next December. Quite a few tweets are warning that British workers are going to lose all sorts of rights overnight.  I am quite sure that it will never happen, at least not in the way that its creator, Jacob Rees-Mogg, would like.

The whole idea is totally insane anyway. Sunak and Truss may have paid lip service to it during their leadership campaign but trashing your own statute book against the clock really is a daft way to produce lasting and effective legislation. No other country on earth would think of doing it and I suspect we won't either in the end.

Here is a typically hysterical tweet about it:

Note the certainty - "will pass" - as if it's all cast in concrete now.  In fact, the REUL Bill is going through parliament and has not reached the Lords yet so quite a long way to go.

Even the TUC are at it although at least they talk of 'if' and use the verb ‘could’ to indicate that it's no more than a possibility: 

I posted about it a couple of weeks ago HERE.

Personally, I don’t believe any of it will actually happen. The government is incredibly unpopular at the moment and we are on the cusp of a long recession. Their polling numbers are absolutely dire. Any party that proposes 'abolishing' "employment rights, food safety, environmental laws, all protections" would have to have a death wish. Whatever your thoughts are on the Conservative party, they don’t have that.

They are going to lose the next election badly no matter what happens but some of them will want to get back into government before the second half of this century if ever, and won’t want to make matters worse than they already are.  Alienating voters by ending rights to holiday pay, maternity leave, non-discrimination, and so on is not the way to political success. It just isn't.

Various organisations have responded to the government's consultation on the Bill and have pointed out the problems of legal uncertainty, civil service staffing levels, and the sheer recklessness of the time scale involved. The Employment Lawyers Association, for example, says the Bill means as many changes to UK employment laws over the next 12 months as happened over the last fifty years!

The Food Standards Agency says they will need extra resources to advise the government on 800 pieces of EU law pertaining to food safety.  Where are all the extra staff coming from?  What happens after 2023, do they all get dismissed?

I am sure the EU takes a dim view of all of this since the Bill itself is totally against the letter and spirit of the withdrawal agreement and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement ((TCA). Both have clauses permitting retaliation if the UK tries any big changes to existing regulations that might give us a competitive edge. And if whatever the Tories have in mind doesn’t give us some sort of advantage, why do it? More to the point why do it at such a pace using scarce resources?

It's just another impossible Brexit conundrum.

Business is dead set against it as well. 

A survey published at the end of November by The British Chambers of Commerce of 938 businesses, mainly SMEs, identified deregulation as a low priority. Just 14% specified a regulation to remove, while another 14% wanted a regulation amended.

William Bain, Head of Trade Policy at the BCC, said: “Businesses did not ask for this Bill, and as our survey highlights, they are not clamouring for a bonfire of regulations for the sake of it. They don’t want to see divergence from EU regulations which makes it more difficult, costly or impossible to export their goods and services.”

Announcing in advance that you intend to drift away from EU law will not bring a solution to the NI protocol any closer either. 

Politically, the Tories are probably going to have to amend a few regulations just to show they can, but the changes will be trivial and meaningless although, like minuscule trade deals, they will be sold as conferring some huge advantage on us, when they will, in fact, be doing the opposite, if they do anything at all.

This is not even to think about the legislative bandwidth taken up in doing something that damages growth,  and workers' rights, reduces your own vote and increases uncertainty for businesses on something that they do not want anyway. You would need to be seriously ill in the head even to think about it.

So, I fully expect parliament to water it down or Sunak to ditch it altogether.  It is nothing but a red herring.

Polling 

As I mentioned above, polling for the Tory party is truly awful and among the many predictions is one based on something called the strong transition model (STM) model, created by Martin Baxter of Electoral Calculus.  It's published by The New Statesman. Labour is forecast to win 459 seats (+257) giving them a majority of 268: 


The Tories are down to 101 seats, which many people will feel overrepresents them by quite a bit. However, in the details, I note some good news for the voters in Selby & Ainsty. That seat is set to go red.

Nigel Adams took Selby in 2010 from John Grogan when Gordon Brown’s Labour became unpopular after the global financial crisis and after 12 years of austerity, corruption and turmoil, Adams has helped to bury the Conservatives and will step down at the next election. 

He is expected to be on Johnson’s resignation list and be rewarded with a seat in the Lords. 

If at some future date it is revealed that he was a paid agent of Vladimir Putin I for one wouldn't be in the least surprised. It's hard to think of any party over the last century that has done more damage to this country and Adams has been in the thick of it for most of his time in parliament.

Posted by at