Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, people watching these proceedings will be astonished that this House seems minded to obstruct this Bill and to fail to fully engage with the difficult and messy process of self-government as an independent, sovereign parliamentary democracy, arising from the largest plebiscite in British history in 2016.

The Bill should be seen in the wider context of what went before and what is proposed, a wider historical context—what I might call the Benn challenge. In his valedictory speech to the House of Commons in March 2001, Tony Benn asked of those tasked with exercising power:

“What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”—[Official Report, Commons, 22/3/01; col. 510.]


Is that not the fundamental question at hand in considering the Bill today? The fact that the EU failed to answer that question is why Brexit happened.

The Bill’s opponents are mostly well-meaning and sincere, and I accept that, but many observers will see an effort to thwart Brexit and render it a failure. Some noble Lords pray in aid the need for scrutiny and oversight, but they were silent when 265,490 EU laws, judgments, directives, regulations and decisions—the mythical EU acquis—mostly taken behind closed doors and rubber-stamped by the European Council of Ministers, were forced on our sovereign Parliament between 1973 and 2020 by virtue of one Act of Parliament: the European Communities Act 1972, Section 2. No one voted for that, unlike Brexit and the Conservative Party manifesto in 2019, and the elected House just last month, which gave this Bill a healthy Third Reading majority.

The withdrawal Act 2020 specifically and formally recognises in Section 38 the right of the UK to exercise—in its own way, within its autonomy and independence through a sovereign Parliament—its own legal regime. It was also well understood in 2018 that the withdrawal Act was iterative and transitional legislation, so a sunset clause is both logical and inevitable, although perhaps arbitrary, and any attempt to extend it beyond either 2023 or 2026 will be viewed as lacking democratic legitimacy.

There is no evidence—this is the Chicken Licken argument—that the Bill will inevitably lead to a weakening of our own domestic legal rights and protections. In any case, no Government can bind the hands of their successors. Any policy development that is against the interests of working people in this country will be judged harshly, and the efficacy of those policies will be judged at a general election. That is the basis of democracy. It is not our place to second-guess the views of the electorate at a forthcoming general election.

We now have opportunities to develop new policies and make our own laws on animal welfare, on vaccine rollout, on freeports and on diverging from EU solvency rules. The Bill honours the commitment made to the British people in 2016 and 2019. I regret that I have not been able to rebut the findings of the committee report published last Thursday, but in due course we will do that in Committee and on Report. Essentially, EU legal and political supremacy has no place in a mature, independent, self-governing democracy.