There was an item on the Today programme on Saturday morning about opposition amendments to the Great Repeal Bill. David Jones, the DEXEU minister who was sacked for reasons still unknown said we are leaving the EU and as part of that, the repeal bill will transfer into British law about 12,000 EU regulations. He described this as an exercise "in the national interest". A phrase often used to force through unpopular things as if we should just accept it.
Opposition MPs have suggested these laws may not have the proper enforcement mechanisms that we have now in the EU. Mr Jones said this would be covered because the UK would create new bodies to carry out the enforcement of all the former EU regulations. By the time the Repeal Bill is passed we will have a matter of a year or so to set up an unknown number of these bodies to enforce these 12,000 laws on all sorts of things that bodies in the EU monitor and scrutinise at the moment. David Jones described this as doable but challenging.
He may be right but let's not forget this is just one more task for the civil service to undertake alongside new immigration, customs, agriculture and fishing policies as well as renegotiating 750 or so international treaties, 35 existing EU trade agreements and a whole host of other things too. A huge tsunami of new law and policy making is approaching us and afterwards, when it has all gone disastrously wrong, we will be able to review the wreckage.
Bernard Jenkins was also on and as usual suggested any resistance to government plans was due to people who really wanted to reverse Brexit. He said the vote last year was "overwhelming" but as time goes by whenever a Brexiteer suggests the people have spoken we will be able to point out that was in 2016, things have changed and the narrow mandate is out of date and no longer valid.
