Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

The costs of Brexit are becoming increasingly clear, the majority of people now see it as a mistake.

Thousands of protesters have marched through central London calling for the UK to rejoin the EU.

The national rejoin march on Saturday saw large crowds of people walk from Park Lane to Parliament Square. Marchers from across the UK travelled for hours to attend.

Parliament Square Garden, the last stop on the march, saw a sea of blue and yellow as supporters waved EU flags and carried placards.

Some signs said: “Brexit was never going to work”, “For lower bills #rejoin the EU” and “We voted romaine”.

Nikki Ajibade, a 60-year-old teacher from Warwickshire, was at the march with her sister.

She said: “We feel very strongly that the situation we’re in now, you can trace it back directly to 2016 referendum, which was supposedly an advisory referendum.

“It wasn’t a supermajority result, 52 and 48 is not something that you can just completely upturn and upend the whole country. Look six years on where we are. So we feel very strongly that we need to get a sensible government in place, general election now, because this lot are squabbling like rats in a sack.”

When asked about Boris Johnson potentially throwing his hat in the ring to become prime minister again, Ajibade said: “If they’re thinking that Boris Johnson is the answer, they haven’t understood the question, come on this is just ridiculous.

“It’s an insult to the nation. It is an actual insult to the British people to even mention his name as a possible candidate.

“I’m not worried about Boris Johnson coming in. I’m not worried. I think it would be absolutely brilliant, because then he would be the last nail in the Tory coffin.

“It is a national disgrace, an international laughing stock, that’s what they’ve turned us into.”

The crowd booed as a large digital screen overlooking Parliament Square Garden showed pictures of leave-voting figures such as Johnson, Priti Patel and Nigel Farage.

Oliver Jackson, a 26-year-old warehouse worker from Dorset, said that it was important for politicians to listen to those who wanted to rejoin the EU.

He said: “We need to get our voice heard. And especially during all this chaos, we can’t let this be left out. Honestly, the best way to get the UK back on track is to rejoin, at the very least, the single market and then the EU.

“Brexit has been the slow death that has been bleeding the UK dry for years.”

The crowd also chanted “Tories out” and booed when speakers discussed the prospect of Johnson running to become prime minister again.

Tony Harold, 44, from Poole, who works in the share market, said that Brexit affected him as he has a property in Spain.

He said: “We’ve seen the damage and it’s all been downhill ever since it started.

“Personally, I have a second home in Spain, and I’ve been impacted directly. It puts me very much top of the pile. But I’ve seen the benefits of the EU, and free movement, both myself and other people around me.

“It allows you to come and go as you will and it enriches lives. It makes people better,

it gives more of a life experience and it’s very sad to see that go.”

Joshua Allotey, 57, from Winchester, who works for a local authority, believed the UK would continue to suffer because of having left the EU.

He said: “Leaving was a bad mistake. It’s already cost the UK a lot. And unless we go back, it will carry on costing us … It was driven by ideology and it’s not actually designed to help the UK. We’re better off inside the EU.

“In long term, we’re going to suffer because we’re not able to sell and buy from Europe, which is our biggest market.”

Controversial Tory bill set to inflict further damage on businesses, with no clues yet about incoming legislation

Tory plans to scrap most EU laws by the end of 2023, to show that Brexit is being delivered, risk causing untold legal chaos and yet more damage to British businesses, according to the former head of the government’s legal service.

With the country still reeling from the effects of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget, ministers are facing mounting opposition from business groups, environmentalists, legal experts, unions and opposition parties to what is being described as another dangerous, ideologically driven experiment by pro-Brexit Tory rightwingers.

Last night Jonathan Jones, who headed the government legal service from 2014 to 2020, and dealt with issues relating to Brexit, warned that the retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill, which will have its second reading in the Commons on Tuesday, will create deep uncertainty for businesses and many other organisations. “I think it is absolutely ideological and symbolic rather than about real policy,” he said.

Under the bill’s provisions, about 2,400 EU laws that were kept on the UK statute book after Brexit, to ensure continuity, will be automatically deleted at the end of next year, except in cases where ministers decide that there should be exemptions.

The plan – which critics say could even mean the scrapping of rules ensuring sports events such as the Olympics can be watched free on television – has outraged unions, who fear the disappearance of laws protecting workers’ rights, and environmentalists, who believe well-established rules protecting wildlife habitats will be lost.

Jones says the government has given no clue as to which laws it plans to scrap, leaving organisations in all sectors completely in the dark as to what legislation will apply to them in future.

Jones told the Observer: “As far as I can see there is no indication of which areas the government is thinking of retaining and which it is getting rid of. So there is no certainty about what laws we will have and what will replace them.”

Business organisations say they need to need to know what regulations – such on standards for manufactured goods – they have to comply with years in advance.

“It is a very, very bad way to change and make law,” Jones said. “This has nothing to do with Brexit. We have left. It creates great uncertainty within a very tight, and completely self-imposed timescale. There is nothing inherent in Brexit that says we have to change the law within a particular period after we have left. It has been driven by the usual suspects wing of the Tory party.”

Lucy Monks, head of international affairs at the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said business groups had made their concerns clear. She said: “Among widespread economic instability and rampant inflation, changes to the regulatory environment for small firms must be carefully weighed up so as not to add an extra burden to already very difficult trading conditions.

“A year just isn’t long enough for small businesses to work out how their operations will need to change in response to a fundamental shift in the regulatory environment, such as the one proposed by the EU revocation and reform bill.”

Labour, which has been reluctant of late to take a stand on EU-related issues for fear of being branded anti-Brexit, will oppose the bill in the Commons.

Shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said: “The last things businesses and workers need is more instability and uncertainty. Not content with crashing our economy, the Conservatives now want to rip up the rules that businesses rely on to trade, and the rights workers rely on to work.”

Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow and chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, said that in a time of economic distress the bill could hardly be more destructive.

She said: “It abolishes overnight thousands of laws, from those covering people’s pension protections, compensation rights if your luggage is lost or travel delayed, to those tackling insider trading, to maternity rights, as well as vital protections for our environment and water quality with no clarity as to what – if anything – will replace them.

“In the light of the pandemonium in parliament, the only sensible thing to do is abandon this before it causes any more headaches for businesses and consumers alike, and start again tackling the problems Brexit has caused when it comes to the protection of EU law.”

The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 created the concept of retained EU law, which meant that the bloc’s legislation continued to have force in the UK until the point at which parliament chose to change it. At the same time it was recognised that some retained EU law would need to be adapted, so as to work once the UK had left the EU.

A government spokesperson said: “The government is committed to taking full advantage of the benefits of Brexit, which is why we are pushing ahead with our retained EU law bill, which will end the special legal status of all retained EU law by 2023.

“This will allow us to rapidly develop new laws and regulations that best fit the needs of the country, removing needless bureaucracy to stimulate growth and cement the UK’s position as a world-class place to start and grow a business.”

At risk: eight EU retained laws that could go
⦿ Controls that prevent cancer-causing materials from being used in cosmetics.

⦿ Rules guaranteeing major sporting events such as the Olympics are free to watch on television.

⦿ Protection for part-time workers so they do not get
less favourable treatment than full-timers.

⦿ Minimum standards that ensure that aircraft are safe to fly.

⦿ Compensation for travellers in the event of delays and lost luggage.

⦿ Minimum requirements for maternity pay.

⦿ Protection for staff pensions when a company goes bust.

⦿ A ban on the trafficking of illegal weapons.

Laws from EU era, including equal pay and workers’ rights, may be poorly redrafted or accidentally repealed

Leading lawyers have sounded the alarm over proposals for post-Brexit legislation that could result in 2,400 laws disappearing overnight – including a ban on animal testing for cosmetics, workers’ rights and environmental protections.

Swathes of laws including equal pay for men and women, pension rights for same-sex married couples, food standards and aviation safety rules could accidentally disappear or be redrafted poorly, they warn.

The retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill will get its second reading on Tuesday. It was designed in such a way that 47 years of laws devised during EU membership will be switched off on 31 December 2023 under a so-called sunset clause.

“A lot of laws are going to be changed without any scrutiny at all by a dying government that few people respect,” said barrister George Peretz KC, a specialist in European law.

The Unison general secretary, Christina McAnea, said: “This is a countdown to disaster for all working people. It ​would mean turning the clock back to Dickensian ​times when workers had no rights.

“In a financial crisis with a headless government, people need stability and support, not a bonfire of numerous employment rights.

“Ministers must act now to reassure everyone that hard-won ​protection won’t be shredded. A free-for-all ​giving the green light to unscrupulous bosses ​is not the ​route to economic growth.”

“All of this is deeply objectionable on two grounds – it is anti-democratic and it is anti-growth,” said Peretz, pointing out that employers need legal certainty on employment laws, technical standards and other matters before expanding or investing.

“We are a democracy and we have a process of making law in parliament. People can write to their MPs, industry gets consulted, we have debates in the House of Commons and in the Lords. This is a completely anti-democratic process,” he added.

Eleonor Duhs, a partner at City law firm Bates Wells and a former government lawyer who helped design the concept of retained EU law, said the government’s plans were completely at odds with Theresa May’s vision to remove EU laws with “full scrutiny and proper debate”.

The concept of retained law was created for a smooth transition, not as a target practice for Brexiters, she argued.

“This bill gives ministers powers to repeal and replace a vast body of what is now domestic law at speed and without proper scrutiny. This is unprecedented, reckless and undemocratic,” said Duhs.

She also raised questions about the use of precious legal drafting resources within Whitehall.

“It took over two years and a vast amount of civil service resource to draft over 600 pieces of legislation to get the statute book ready for Brexit. Those changes were technical and straightforward compared with the complexity of what will be required under this bill.

“At a time when civil service resource is falling, the task of rewriting this vast body of law in a few short months appears impossible. Errors, omissions and gaps in the law are inevitable,” she said.

The notion that 2,400 laws could be expunged in little over a year was “completely barking”, said Peretz, but possible because of the “extraordinary power” the government was giving itself to push laws over the December 2023 cliff.

“There is no requirement anywhere on ministers to consult anybody. Under this bill, ministers can just let vital rights and protections for consumers, workers, the environment and animal welfare fall without parliament having any chance to stop that happening,” he said.

“This is nothing to do with whether you support Brexit or not. You can be a fanatical supporter of Brexit and still think this is not the right thing to do.

“All of this is being done in the most immense rush, and when you do things in a rush there is a risk that mistakes are made.”

The bill also gives ministers the powers to rewrite or “update” the rules, with no requirement to consult and at most only a two-hour debate in parliament to say yes or no, but, despite promises from Jacob Rees-Mogg that Brexit could mean higher standards than the EU’s, it does not confer power to improve standards and protections, but only to reduce them.

Environmental campaigners including Chris Packham have already sounded the alarm on the threat to disapply environmental rules protecting rare flora and fauna in the 38 new investment zones in England to enable “accelerated development”.

Opinion
Jacob Rees-Mogg is plotting to change thousands of laws under cover of Tory chaos
George Peretz

A bill sweeping aside EU law doesn’t just threaten our rights, it tells business that critical legislation is subject to ministerial whims

“Retained EU law” is something that sounds interesting only to legal geeks. But it matters, and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s plans to sweep aside 47 years’ worth of these laws – set out in a bill due to be debated by the Commons on Tuesday – matter a lot.

Until Brexit, UK law was heavily influenced by our membership of the EU. So when we left, Theresa May’s government drew up legislation – the EU Withdrawal Act – to keep most laws in place until parliament decided to replace them, both to avoid huge gaps and to keep very important rights and protections.

The Rees-Mogg bill does three things. First, it repeals all that law (except for law incorporated into an act of parliament) in one fell swoop on 31 December 2023, unless ministers decide to rescue any of it, or delay the repeal. That means that rights and protections such as (to give only a few examples) caps on your working hours, your rights if your employer is sold, the ban on selling cosmetics tested on animals, protections of environmentally sensitive sites and your rights to compensation if your flight is cancelled all vanish unless ministers decide to keep them – and ministers can decide to let them disappear without any consultation or parliamentary scrutiny whatsoever.

Second, it gives ministers huge powers to replace those rules with new rules, without any need to consult those affected and usually without any vote in parliament – and when there is a vote it will be a yes/no vote, after one short debate, and under the threat that the rules will vanish completely if parliament says “no”. The only limit on ministers’ powers is that the new rules cannot increase “burdens”: which means that they can’t be used to improve rights and protections but only to remove them – and all the rights I listed above, and countless others, will be vulnerable to gutting by ministerial fiat.

Third, even when retained EU law survives that process, the bill deliberately creates uncertainty about what it continues to mean, by ordering the courts to stop interpreting it in the way in which EU law is normally interpreted and nudging them to ignore relevant case law of the European court of justice.

The arguments put forward for the bill should be unconvincing even to Brexiters. Vote Leave was keen to tell voters that rights and protections found in EU law would stay and that any changes to them would be made democratically and by parliament. The real basis for the bill – apart from grabbing power to slash rights and protections without proper scrutiny – is a form of bigotry: the prejudice that because law comes from the EU it is necessarily bad and that it is so important to cleanse it from the UK statute book that normal democratic processes should be suspended; and that replacement rules should be made without taking the time to make sure that they work and do not have unintended consequences. Like all bigotry, that prejudice is unsupported by any coherent analysis.

The bill is grossly undemocratic in its contempt for public and parliamentary scrutiny. But it is also profoundly anti-growth. There is always scope for improving and updating regulation. But getting it right, in a complex world, requires thought, consultation and challenge. What the bill does is to tell business that critical legislation of huge importance to them is subject to arbitrary ministerial repeal or rushed and unscrutinised rewriting, and that what remains will be deliberately thrown into uncertainty.

As the keen Brexiter George Eustice said while attempting to defeat this proposal when he was in government, “messing around” with regulation in this way “costs businesses money and is unlikely to make much difference”. Put more bluntly and more accurately, it is hard to think of any message that could be more calculated to put business off investing in the UK.

Rees-Mogg’s bill is bad for our democracy and bad for our economy. Labour has said it will oppose it, and all MPs – including Conservative MPs who supported Brexit – should vote it down.

George Peretz KC is a barrister at Monckton Chambers, specialising in public, regulatory and competition law