For all the headlines one of the most striking things about the Government’s ill-advised reset summit with the EU on 19 May was that there was not a great deal of substance and for most purposes it amounted to little more than an agreement to negotiate an agreement. Yes, it expressly stated that a veterinary agreement would require dynamic alignment, but we already knew that the Government wanted to negotiate a Veterinary Agreement and that this would, by definition, involve dynamic alignment on SPS, so when the summit said it would involve SPS dynamic alignment we didn’t learn anything. That said there is a context – which has gained little public attention – in which the reset is significantly more advanced, the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, which will conclude its passage through Parliament on Wednesday, ahead of Royal Assent.
The Bill is deeply controversial for two reasons.
In the first instance, it bestows very extensive legislative powers on the executive, where the resulting legislation cannot be amended by Parliament and where Parliament has very limited opportunities to provide any kind of scrutiny. As a new MP, the thing I find most shocking about the Commons is the huge volume of legislation that is pushed passed the elected chamber by so-called negative assent procedure without even a short debate even if members object. This Bill will make the problem significantly worse.
In the second instance, it provides a framework whereby ministers can, if they wish, simply apply EU law to Great Britain in this unamendable form with zero scrutiny in the Commons if the legislation is introduced by negative assent procedure and often virtually zero scrutiny if applied by the affirmative assent procedure. When challenged in the Lords the Government was at pains to say that it would not automatically apply EU legislation, and it would make a judgement on a case by case basis about whether applying EU law to Great Britain was the right thing to do. The key point, though, is that the Bill gives the executive the power to make that judgement, and there is nothing to stop them using the mechanism provided by the Bill to simply apply EU law to Great Britain.
In seeking to come to terms with this risk we have to acknowledge that the Government has both a strong motivation and an excuse for doing so.
In addition to having a government that lacks a single person with a business background in Cabinet, we also have a government that does not include a single Cabinet minister who did not vote remain, and who would not love us to rejoin the EU. What better way to prepare the ground for this than by subjecting us to EU law and then, referring back to that principal motivation for Brexit, ‘taking back control’, pointing out that we would have more control over our laws if we were in the EU, represented in the European Parliament and Council of Ministers that makes the legislation. We should rejoin the EU to ‘take back control.’
Of course this would be big a gamble. The people of the United Kingdom are not stupid. They could respond by saying, we will only take back control in that sense because you are choosing to use the powers granted to the executive through this bill to impose EU law on us. You could instead act in good faith in respect of the biggest democratic vote in the history of the UK and, instead of seeking to develop a means of imposing laws upon us that act as if Brexit has not happened, draft legislation that endeavours to make the most of Brexit, securing for us the greatest available competitive advantage.
In responding to this point of vulnerability, however, the Government has another line of defence, a quasi-unionist line of defence. They can claim that the reasons why they are introducing the legislation is to prevent divergence between Great Britain and Northern Ireland because Northern Ireland is governed by the EU in a 300 areas of law and so they must use the powers afforded the executive through this Act in order to protect the union.
That, however, is a nonsense that needs calling out, and which it is the purpose of the Report Stage amendments that I have tabled to the Bill, to call out.
The truth is that far from affording the current government justification for sabotaging Brexit in Great Britain, the failure to deliver Brexit to Northern Ireland must serve to put into sharper focus, the conviction and resolve that Great Britain should not similarly be robbed of Brexit. Instead, appreciation of the wrong that has been done should mobilise the whole country to rise up and require the EU to respect the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and to withdraw the humiliation of the customs and international SPS border with which they are currently cutting us to two, disenfranchising 1.9 million of us in 300 areas of law.
In seeking to effectively grab extensive legislative powers to the executive for the purpose of sabotaging Brexit, this Government is demonstrating an extraordinary disrespect for democracy, validated by a sense of elitism that is very ill-fitting in the British body politic. The Government backed by the smallest number of votes ever, 9,708,716, is seeking to negate the biggest expression of democracy in the history of our country, the vote of 23 June 2017 in which 17,410,742 million people voted to leave the EU. In order to gain a sense of just how far they have over-extended themselves we must remember that even the minority labour government of February 1974 received 11,645,616, nearly two million more votes than the current government and that Jeremy Corbyn received a bigger mandate to form Her Majesty’s Opposition in December 2019, than did the current Prime Minister to govern in 2024, 10,269,051 votes.
Labour’s Product Regulation and Metrology Bill will allow ministers to sabotage Brexit without scrutiny
