Wednesday 8 March 2023

REUL Bill: Sunak will soon acknowledge the Bill is dead

The inews has a great article (£) by Paul Waugh, their chief political commentator, on the prospects for the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. It was introduced into the Commons on 19 January but at the moment it's drifting aimlessly in the Lords like the Marie Celeste, where it will probably sink very soon. Their Lordships have tabled a lot of amendments, many of which are about parliament rather than ministers having the main role in repealing or amending 4,000 or so retained EU laws. If MPs reject those it’s tantamount to the lower house of our legislature voting to emasculate itself.

To do that, would make a mockery of parliament. Imagine Tory MPs bellyaching all these years about parliamentary sovereignty and then rejecting any chance of being involved and delegating it all to ministers under so-called Henry VIII powers. It really would look stupid.

You can imagine MPs not wanting to rock the government boat in the Commons by introducing amendments themselves, but voting down the opportunity to scrutinise new legislation is something else isn’t it?

Without much difficulty, I can see on day 4 of the debate, peers put forward 79 amendments to add to the 68 already put down. That's 147 so far.  Work on the committee stage continues today. And if any of the amendments granting MPs the right to debate and vote on changes to the body of Retained EU Law (REUL) get through, the Bill might as well be dead anyway since it will swamp parliament and MPs will never agree on what laws need to change, let alone how.

Anyway, opposition inside parliament is just a small part of the government's problems. Outside it's even worse. 

Waugh says:

"While the TUC is very worried about a watering down of basic rights to maternity and holidays, business is unnerved by the huge uncertainty the Bill creates. Wildlife groups like the RSPB, safety groups like the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and even the Women’s Institute (that bastion of Middle England) have formed a formidable alliance against the plans.

"Given that this whole exercise is supposed to be “liberating” British firms to boost growth, the level of scepticism among companies is stark. I’ve been passed details of a new YouGov poll of businesses by the safety group Unchecked UK, and it makes difficult reading for ministers.

"The polling found that firms strongly support environmental regulation. Some 72 percent said that the government regulates businesses’ environmental practices “too little” or the “right amount”. Only a fifth think the regulations are excessive.

"Nearly four in five (79 percent) UK businesses said that they are not willing to accept lower health and safety standards for their employees and customers, with just seven percent saying they would accept a weakening of the rules.

"Removing current regulations was also way down business’s list of priorities. Energy costs, inflation, labour shortages and Brexit itself were their four most pressing worries."

As you can see from the piece, almost everybody and his uncle is against the Bill, from the opposition parties, peers, trade bodies, environmental groups, charities and even now the Women’s Institute. In fact, it looks like it’s only the Conservative parliamentary party and a few nut jobs outside.

Also, bear in mind the TCA contains various measures the EU can use to retaliate if we depart too far from EU rules in an attempt to tilt the playing field in our favour. Yesterday, coincidentally the EU unanimously passed legislation to enable the Commission to implement those rebalancing provisions. 

It’s known that the EU is very concerned with the prospect of the REUL Bill becoming law. 

And don’t forget, with regard to the Windsor Framework, the more our laws diverge the more the EU will demand checks, and they can unilaterally change or withdraw any concessions beyond what’s in the NI protocol. Sunak has been keen to improve relations with the EU and restore trust after the Frost/Johnson years and ramming through the REUL will simply be a return to the fractious atmosphere of 2019-20.

Therefore any changes to the REUL are likely to be very minor, somewhere between marginal and insignificant at best.

Apart from all of this, the Lord's amendments will certainly delay the Bill and could eventually force the government to use the 1911 and 1949 parliament acts to get it through. This would delay things for 12 months and every month of delay is a month less for civil servants to comb through the 4,000 EU laws, making the Bill less and less practical. We are well into the well-known problem of the amount of time left to do the job reducing while the work left to do does not. It usually ends badly.

It was virtually impossible in January to check all 4000 EU laws and every month increases the workload intensity even more.

The REUL Bill sets the end of 2023 as the deadline but this can in theory be extended up to 23 June 2026. The Tories will be out by the end of 2024, so the prospects of the Bill surviving the parliamentary process and being used to wipe out any significant EU laws are practically zero.

Can anyone imagine any PM, not just Sunak, dying in a ditch to force through a widely unpopular Bill, opposed by so many different groups, will bog parliament and the civil service down for months even years, risk upsetting your main international trading partner, and in the end achieve almost nothing? 

Sunak will be looking for an escape route very soon. Watch out for it.

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