Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ms Ghani]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. To ensure that the devolved Governments are also able to fully seize the benefits of Brexit, we are providing them with the tools to reform the retained EU law that is within their own devolved competence. That will give the devolved Governments greater flexibility to decide how they should regulate those areas currently governed by retained EU law. The majority of the powers in the Bill are conferred on the devolved Governments, which will enable them to take more active decisions about their citizens and their businesses. The devolved Governments will also have the ability to decide which retained EU law they wish to preserve and assimilate, and which they wish to let sunset within their devolved competences.

Since we left the EU, more powers have already been passed on to devolved Administrations, in areas such as farming, fishing and the environment. Under the Bill, these powers can continue to be there. The question is: why would they not enjoy that power to make sure that decisions are taken that best fit their communities? We have carefully considered how this Bill will have an impact on each of the four great nations and we recognise that it is of paramount importance that we continue to work together as one on important issues, including the environment.

As has been mentioned, we accept that some retained EU law in scope of the sunset is required to continue to operate our international obligations, including the trade and co-operation agreement, the withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol. Therefore, I am happy to make a commitment here today that the Government will, as a priority, take the action required to ensure that the necessary legislation is in place to uphold the UK’s international obligations. In the near future, we will set out where retained EU law is required. Obviously, as well as sharing things on the dashboard, we are working closely with officials in Northern Ireland.

One amendment relates to carving out devolved nations. This Bill must and should apply to all nations of the UK. The territorial scope of the Bill is UK-wide and it is therefore constitutionally appropriate that the sunset applies across all four sovereign nations of the UK. One of the Bill’s primary objectives is to end retained EU law as a legal category across the UK. Providing a carve-out for legislation that is within a devolved competence would severely impact the coherence of the UK statute book and legal certainty for our public and businesses.

I also commend my Cabinet colleagues who are already making gallant efforts to establish ambitious reform plans that will help to drive growth. We are already in the process of removing outdated retained EU law in financial services, through the Financial Services and Markets Bill, and we have already repealed other outdated rules, enabling us to capitalise on tax freedoms. For example, the Government have ended the tampon tax by removing VAT on women’s sanitary products. We have also been able to embrace other opportunities, such as on vaccines, freeports, gene editing, free trade agreements, EU budget payments, immigration control, fishing and even foreign policy on Ukraine. Outside the EU’s unwritten rules on solidarity in foreign policy, we were the first to send arms to defend Ukraine, ignoring German bans on such equipment. That is unlikely to have happened when we were in the EU.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

rose—

[Ms Ghani]

I will finish this point and then I will take some interventions. We also now have AUKUS, where we have signed a nuclear submarine deal with Australia, in opposition to France; we have new agricultural support schemes; and—this is one of my favourites—no MEPs means more democracy here.

[Ms Ghani]

It will indeed help the cockle industry. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has said that it will be maintaining and enhancing when it comes to the environment, including our waters. My hon. Friend is absolutely right; this is just an enabling Bill. It is a process to enable Departments to review EU law to see what we can do to ensure that regulation best suits us here in the UK and that we are nimble for the sectors we want to promote. Some of the sectors we want to work fast and hard in are incredibly progressive and modern, and we cannot have law that is made for a much larger group of nations overseeing us here in the UK.

[Patrick Grady]

Is that not precisely the point: any Department, at any time, that identifies areas of retained EU law that it thinks need to be reformed can bring forward primary legislation—that is the point of parliamentary sovereignty—so that it can be properly scrutinised in this place? The Minister does not need the powers in this Bill. This House already has those powers—I thought that that was supposed to be the point of parliamentary sovereignty.

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[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is interesting to hear some Members go on about how retained EU law has a special status in UK law. It is only special because the UK says it is; for everyone else, it is just “the law”. Yes, it has been inherited from our time in the EU, but that was the point of incorporating it in the first place, and now it governs and regulates thousands of aspects of our daily lives, and, as we have heard from a number of Members, protects a great many of our hard-won rights and freedoms.

It is a contradiction to say that this Bill, particularly or uniquely, somehow asserts or reasserts parliamentary sovereignty. Every Bill passed in this House asserts parliamentary sovereignty, even for those of us who believe in popular sovereignty. That is the point. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) said at the start of the debate a long time ago, there is not a single law, regulation or rule in the corpus of retained EU law that the Government, through this House, could not repeal, replace or reform at any time of their choosing through primary legislation.

In her opening speech, the Minister herself reeled off all the great Brexit Bills and Acts that Parliament has already passed. That proves the point that we do not need the powers in this Bill, and we certainly do not need the sunset clauses and cliff edges that it establishes. The Bill reveals contempt for parliamentary sovereignty—a massive power grab from this House and the devolved institutions, and unprecedented power placed in the hands of Ministers and the Whitehall mandarins who have simply stepped in to replace the Brussels bureaucrats so hated by the ERG and their Brexiteer friends.

If the Government genuinely believed in parliamentary sovereignty and the devolution settlement, they would accept the amendments tabled. They would pay particular attention to amendment 36, as everyone has remarked and several of their Back Benchers have signed. Many constituents in Glasgow North—in which, incidentally, 78% voted to remain in the European Union; I make no apology for standing up for their views—have told me that they believe the amendment will offer at least some degree of protection from the bonfire of rights and freedoms that this Bill represents.

The Government could admit that the game is up and that there is no prospect of seriously reviewing the thousands of regulations that make up EU retained law by the end of this year. They could accept SNP amendment 33 to drop the sunset clause altogether. At the very least, they could accept amendments 28 to 31, which would protect the powers of Scotland’s Parliament and Government to legislate in areas that were already supposed to be devolved under the terms of the Scotland Act. They say there is no power grab, but they have grabbed powers that should have come from Brussels directly to the Scottish Parliament.

But the Government will do none of those things. They will press ahead with the fantasy that this Bill is necessary in the first place, and that its aims are achievable within the timescale set out. It is perhaps ironic that in “Star Trek” there was an evil race called the Borg who would come to assimilate entire planets and civilisations into their collective consciousness. That is how the Brexiteers viewed the European Union. Now, it is the Government who want EU retained law to be renamed “assimilated law” on the statute book. Nothing else will change and the effect of the laws will be the same, but references to the hated European Union will have been purged. What a huge achievement.

Unlike the Borg or the UK Government, it is the EU laws that have protected and enhanced our liberties, freedoms and basic health and safety in these islands over the past 40 years. This Bill, and the Government’s refusal to accept any amendments this evening, expose the Government’s true agenda. By scrapping retained EU law, they want to create a race to the bottom, a buyer-beware, survival-of-the-fittest economy that pays minimal regard to democratic oversight and even less to the welfare of the poorest and most vulnerable. That was the Brexiteers’ agenda all along: stuff the consequences playing out in society and the economy all around us.

Once again, with a rather heavy dose of irony, it will fall to the unelected House of Lords to stand up for democracy and against the worst excesses of this Tory Government. The Government will come back after the Lords have dealt with this Bill with their tail between their legs, admitting that what they proposed was never viable in the first place. For people in Scotland, there is another option—a route out of this Tory madness and back into the partnership, community and mutual respect of the European Union. That is the popular sovereignty that comes with independence.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on his reference to “Star Trek” on Report. At least he referred to the amendments as well.

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[Patrick Grady]

The Minister would not take an intervention, but I think the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) is going to be pretty disappointed. I suspect it will, ironically, fall to the unelected House to look at the amendments that the Government rejected this evening and decide that perhaps they have a place in the Bill after all. At that point, the climbdown will have to begin and the Bill team, who no doubt have worked extremely hard, will have to work even harder, because they will have to find a compromise and a way to explain why everything the Minister said at the Dispatch Box about how necessary and workable this Bill is was completely and utterly incorrect. In reality, the Bill is totally unworkable and totally unnecessary.

The right hon. Member for North East Somerset and his Brexiteer friends wanted to take back control to this House. They wanted parliamentary sovereignty. This Bill does not assert parliamentary sovereignty; it hands it over to the Executive to pass thousands of laws, or to get rid of thousands of laws, by Executive diktat. That is not parliamentary sovereignty. The people in Scotland can see exactly what is happening, and it will not be long before they reclaim their popular sovereignty.