A bonfire of EU laws is easily achieved

Nearly 4,000 laws passed by the European Union remain on the statute book. More than 2,400 are listed on the Government’s Dashboard, with which we made it easy for Rishi Sunak to deliver on his leadership promise. Since then another 1,400 have apparently been found by the National Archives hiding on dusty shelves.

These rules and regulations, spewed out by a great bureaucratic machine, became UK law without any ability to amend them or, if based on EU regulations, even debate them. Some were passed on the basis of qualified majority vote and were opposed by British governments. The Retained EU Law Bill, which recently had its second reading in the House of Commons, will either repeal them or bring them into domestic law.

The former process, with laws at times brought in simply by the fiat of ministers (although even that was sometimes overridden by the EU) will be replaced with the conscious assent of Parliament. This will revoke the remaining supremacy of EU law, which is an absurdity six years after we voted to leave.

Not surprisingly, those who wish we had never left the EU are squealing about this Bill. Even though the Government has committed to maintain all the environmental protections that currently exist and met a number of the environmental lobby groups to confirm this, they immediately responded by calling for the Bill to be dropped because they prefer EU to UK law. They idealise bureaucracy over democracy.

In Whitehall, the objection is the volume of work and the number of people that would be required to carry it out. As much of the Civil Service is still not physically coming into work, this rather reinforces an unfortunate image of a workshy Civil Service which is in many cases unfair.

Ludicrously, when I served in the Business Department, I was told that to deal with 318 EU rules, 370 officials would be required for a year. This meant more than one person for a full year on every individual regulation. How could that be? Surely every department keeps its stock of rules under constant review as the ordinary routine business of a ministry.

Perhaps 50 years of EU membership addled government departments’ ability to think independently. In the Bill the proposal is either to keep the rules if necessary, but rewrite them in domestic legal terms, or to repeal them altogether. That is not an unduly complex task, indeed as the default is repeal, nothing needs to be done to allow unnecessary rules to wither.

In part, how regulation develops will be about the type of economy we choose. Should it be one where consumers and producers make decisions and are free from detailed regulations, or should it follow the EU pattern of prescriptive rules on every producer? This will affect the workload at the Business Department as there are about 40 energy labelling requirements covering dishwashers, washing machines, ovens and tumble driers.

Beyond that there are eco design rules for directional lamps and solid fuel boilers among many others. Assuming consumers are naturally intelligent, will they not decide to buy the most efficient equipment for themselves? Can they not be trusted?

Even if these rules are required, they could be combined. This would allow dozens of regulations to be simplified and reduce the administrative burden on the Government, Parliament and the British people. It is not just that swathes of peculiar laws could be removed, the Bill will restore, from the end of 2023, the usual principles of the British constitution, and fulfil the referendum promise to take back control. There will be no special EU hierarchy – law passed at whatever date will take its place in the firmament as equal British legislation and it will be easier for domestic courts to depart from EU legal judgments.

Indeed the Retained EU Law Bill will be the cornerstone of the restored constitutional settlement. As at the Restoration itself, the laws of the Interregnum were publicly burned in a symbolic rejection of illegitimacy, so this Bill will restore legitimacy.

The critics have stood logic on its head. Laws that had no mandate will be replaced or repealed by a parliamentary act with scrutiny in both Houses. The uncertainty of two competing legal systems will be replaced with certainty, and the illegitimate supremacy and alien legal system will be excised.

It is an essential completion of Brexit without which we would be an EU fellow traveller.