The Guardian view on scrapping EU rules: the threat remains
T he government’s retained EU law bill always was – and still remains – a dangerous stunt, even after a significant change was made to it this week. The bill aims to scrap thousands of laws and rules adopted by UK law while Britain was part of the EU. It was devised by Jacob Rees-Mogg when Boris Johnson was prime minister. It then became the subject of a Brexiter bidding war between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak during the Conservative leadership election last summer, as a result of which a deadline of the end of 2023 was added by Ms Truss for the laws to be wiped from the statute book.
This week, the trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch, announced that the 2023 deadline has now been scrapped. Instead, some 600 EU-derived laws will be removed by the year’s end and the remainder, more than 4,000 at the last count, will be the subject of “assessment and consultation” with a view to most of them also being scrapped eventually. Removing the arbitrary deadline makes the bill a bit less destructive. But it is still dogmatic and dangerous.
The original bill had two central purposes. The first was to expunge EU laws and rules from the UK statute book as a performative act of reclaimed sovereignty by a nation that prided itself for throwing off its supposed vassal status. This gave the bill totemic status among the Conservative party’s Brexit fundamentalists, which has only grown larger since Mr Sunak, of whom the dogmatists are suspicious, alarmed them by reaching a new compromise with the EU over Northern Ireland.
This explains why Ms Badenoch announced the scrapping of the deadline not to parliament, as she should have done, but in the columns of the Daily Telegraph, which headlined its story with the announcement that the “Whitehall
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