The new Northern Ireland protocol, keeping open the Irish land border, will still require a regulatory morass somewhere on Belfast docks. A few areas, such as finance, have been excluded as just too explosive to London’s now shaky future as Europe’s money market. Millions of pounds in costs are piling up. Environment and food is fighting its way through 1,100 acts, governing everything from quarantine rules to salmonella. The health department needs 100 officials to reform 137 acts. The business department spent £600,000 in two months on staffing costs alone to review the bill. Thousands of civil servants could be involved in a panic rush later this year.
The implications of the bill have already caused chaos in Whitehall.
Any MPs who dared to quarrel were charged as closet remainers. Its architect was Johnson’s now out-of-office henchman Jacob Rees-Mogg, behaving like a teenager disconnecting a car’s brakes and safety devices before going on a joyride. Hardline Brexiters, ever desperate to show their muscle, then drummed up the present bill to honour their desire for a bonfire of controls. Such laws covered swathes of public life: farming, food safety, health standards, travel, animals, employment rights, water and air quality, tax liability, consumer protection, even civil liberties, indeed almost every activity that would benefit from what Margaret Thatcher hailed as the largest market in the world. At the time of Brexit, it was agreed that, in general, regulatory harmonisation with the EU would remain for the time being so that trade could continue. It blandly states that some 3,000 to 4,000 statutes passed by parliament over half a century of Britain’s EU membership must now be rewritten by ministers, not parliament, or they will lapse at “sunset” on 31 December this year. This bill is so outrageously undemocratic that it would have been flushed down the loo by any parliament before the gutless one that Johnson ushered in after the 2019 election. It is currently being asked to approve a Boris Johnson legacy, the retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill. T he House of Lords may be doomed, so reformers say, but it has a last chance to redeem itself.
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