We are not making enough of our Brexit freedoms – no wonder voters are angry
There are worrying signs that Brexit plans are being delayed, sabotaged, watered down or stifled by resistance from a Remainsupporting Blob within Whitehall
Brexit gives our country huge opportunities to do better in all sorts of ways. But, by itself, it does not guarantee that we will actually take advantage of those opportunities. Now we have taken back control, it is up to us as a nation to use the freedom we have gained to deliver tangible results.
Unfortunately, two years into a Parliament with a large Tory and pro-Brexit majority, there is a horrible feeling that momentum has dissipated. Allowance must be made for the huge distraction of having to deal with the unexpected Covid emergency.
Even so, there are worrying indications that radical plans which would take advantage of our Brexit freedoms are being delayed, sabotaged, watered down or stifled by resistance from a Remain-supporting Blob within Whitehall and the legal establishment.
Great Britain has now largely escaped from the EU’s legal jurisdiction, but that cannot be said of Northern Ireland. Vast swathes of EU laws still apply there, as does the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
Border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland are a serious and important problem. But having a foreign system of law applying within Northern Ireland – which voters there cannot change or influence and which will progressively diverge from UK law – is a fundamental challenge for democracy, and is actually the cause of the border checks problem.
The deeply flawed Northern Ireland Protocol resulted from the exigencies of the exit process. The EU must be brought to recognise that no sovereign and independent state can possibly tolerate for more than a short time a part of its territory being subject to foreign courts and foreign laws. Lord Frost, the minister responsible, has been negotiating to remove Northern Ireland from ECJ jurisdiction, as well as on medicines and border checks.
Yet press briefings given to EU journalists last week – apparently from elsewhere in Whitehall – resulted in flurries of headlines that the UK would climb down from its demands for ECJ jurisdiction to be ended, at least for the time being.
This sign of weakness naturally led the European Commission to dig in and reiterate its resistance to ending ECJ powers over Northern Ireland. Negotiating with the EU in this way, without the whole government machine being unified and disciplined, is simply hopeless.
On the human rights front, little has been done in the two years of this Parliament. The Government commissioned an “independent” review of the Human Rights Act, which has produced an enormously long and underwhelming report, suggesting minimal changes and some “discussions” in the Council of Europe that are likely to be futile.
Dominic Raab, recently arrived at the Ministry of Justice, has gone further and launched a consultation on making changes to UK domestic law to ameliorate some of the worst flaws of the Act. These changes are welcome enough. They are very much in line with what the Conservative members (including myself) of the coalition government’s Bill of Rights Commission recommended 10 years ago. Strengthening protection for freedom of speech against encroachment by other “rights” such as data protection and our new judge-made privacy law is particularly welcome.
Yet I fear that these proposals will not solve the fundamental problem. The Strasbourg-based Court of Human Rights has long lost any pretence of interpreting the Convention according to the meaning intended by the states who drafted it.
Instead, it embroiders on ever wider and ever more extreme human rights’ doctrines of its own devising. By apparently committing to stay within the Convention, come what may, the Government risks weakening and diluting these reforms.
The Government’s by-election disaster in North Shropshire has many causes: an important one is a feeling that the Government has lost its central purpose and strategy, and is now just buffeted around by shortterm events.
A central motor is needed within government driving the post-Brexit process forwards, and keeping all arms of the government machine focused on delivering the benefits of Brexit to the people who voted for it. It may be that our Prime Minister is not suited by personality to be that motor himself, that he needs to appoint a person or persons to do the job and back them to the hilt.
We are approaching the halfway mark of the current Parliament and there is no time to allow for drift.