Rishi Sunak has u-turned on his leadership campaign promise to repeal thousands of retained EU laws at a stroke. A written statement – always the preferred vehicle for awkward government news – from Kemi Badenoch this afternoon confirmed that the government will in fact only scrap around 600 laws in the Retained EU Law Bill by the end of this year. It has infuriated members of the European Research Group of Brexiteer Tory MPs. Former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg has also had a pop at the Prime Minister for an ‘admission of administrative failure, an inability of Whitehall to do the necessary work and an incapability of ministers to push this through their own departments’.
Sunak made the pledge when he was trying to catch up with Liz Truss in the first Tory leadership contest. In the broadcast he promised to ‘review or repeal post-Brexit EU laws: all 2,400 of them’ in his first 100 days of power. I say ‘he promised’, but Sunak was notably absent from the video. The only figure in there was a headless man who made a ‘hmm’ sound while stacking boxes by a shredder, and the promise was made in subtitles. Perhaps this makes it easier for Sunak to detach himself from this promise in the same way he does with other political trouble.
As it happens, this u-turn is overall a good thing for parliament. Giving ministers the ability to scrap laws at whim and without scrutiny wasn’t really an example of MPs taking back control. It was an executive power grab, and whether Sunak has backed away from it for that reason or because the ‘blob’, as Rees-Mogg referred to it, has succeeded, it is better not to trust the government with even more legislative power than it already has.
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