John Longworth is a businessman and entrepreneur, Chairman of the Foundation for Independence and of the Independent Business Network, and a former MEP for the Brexit Party and the Conservatives.
Brexit provided us with the invaluable ability to have democratic self-determination. It stopped us having to pay an EU membership fee which would now be well in excess of £22 billion a year. It also offered to enable us to pursue the big three economic benefits: trade deals, tax cuts and regulatory divergence.
It gave the U.K. the ability to cut external tariffs and to make trade arrangements with whoever we like. Under Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch this has been pursued with vigour – the latest move being the UK’s long-term game-changing membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The Government has gone into reverse on tax but, in the long run, will be forced to come to its senses, including on Net Zero tax and subsidies.
Cutting red tape offers a huge opportunity but also the most politically difficult. Hard cases make bad law – and every law has a cheerleader.
And divergence enables us to compete internationally, which is why the EU will do its utmost to prevent it. Dealing with the existing burden of regulation is potentially as big as the benefits from trade, given that 70 per cent of our GDP is generated domestically and only less than 12 per cent has to comply with EU rules for export.
There has been a flurry of partly justified indignation regarding the fate of the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL), with a fair amount of vitriol heaped upon Badenoch. The perceived problem is a retreat from the promised “sunsetting” of around 4000 pieces of EU law. This had had been established as a default process, in order to encourage the proper and rapid assessment of these laws, in order to decide whether they should be retained, amended or scrapped.
Recognition that such an assessment is necessary is important – since amongst the acquis there are doubtless laws which we would have made ourselves and wish to retain or modify, as well as those that are unduly burdensome and should go.
Above all, there should be a recognition that all should be converted into a common law format, so that precedent and case law can be properly applied, as can the application of a goal-based approach, which in turn encourages good practice. None of this latter aspect is directly linked to sunsetting.
An example of where these precepts apply from my own experience would be in relation to the Food Hygiene Directive from the late 1980s (since modified), which was based on the U.K. Food and Drugs Act. It allowed for the provision of a precautions and diligence defence, which drives business systems to produce good outcomes and allows freedom of interpretation. I know this because at the time, as an executive in a large conglomerate which included food, I wrote it (long story).
I can also relate at first hand how government, especially Whitehall, works when tasked with deregulation, since I was seconded to Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation task force, which was led by one Michael Heseltine and which clearly had no intention of diverging from the EU, let alone deregulating.
Even in those halcyon days of the Thatcher administration, the then Department for Trade and Industry did everything possible to delay deregulation until a change of administration came along and, in the meantime, came up with hundreds of quite useless and redundant laws with which to claim that the “red tape challenge” had been met.
The DTI also managed bury a report we commissioned from Freshfields, the lawyers, that identified a key problem – the fundamental difference between EU codified law which prevents any action not permitted, and common law, under which everything is permitted unless prohibited. The Anglicisation of law was key but ignored.
I am confident that Badenoch is facing a similar situation. The Whitehall machine is on a go slow, likely to find economically useless rules to delete and kick the can down the road into 2025/26 – in the hope that a new administration will halt the process. They are being ably abetted by the Lords and byotherworldly MPs in the Commons. Given this, the realpolitik solution of focusing on a large batch of meaningful deregulation, and converting the whole body of legislation into a common law compatible format ,could herald a much more meaningful result for divergence, business and the economy.
It remains to be seen whether this urgent business produces the desired result, but it is in principle a game changer.
John Longworth is a businessman and entrepreneur, Chairman of the Foundation for Independence and of the Independent Business Network, and a former MEP for the Brexit Party and the Conservatives.
Brexit provided us with the invaluable ability to have democratic self-determination. It stopped us having to pay an EU membership fee which would now be well in excess of £22 billion a year. It also offered to enable us to pursue the big three economic benefits: trade deals, tax cuts and regulatory divergence.
It gave the U.K. the ability to cut external tariffs and to make trade arrangements with whoever we like. Under Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch this has been pursued with vigour – the latest move being the UK’s long-term game-changing membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The Government has gone into reverse on tax but, in the long run, will be forced to come to its senses, including on Net Zero tax and subsidies.
Cutting red tape offers a huge opportunity but also the most politically difficult. Hard cases make bad law – and every law has a cheerleader.
And divergence enables us to compete internationally, which is why the EU will do its utmost to prevent it. Dealing with the existing burden of regulation is potentially as big as the benefits from trade, given that 70 per cent of our GDP is generated domestically and only less than 12 per cent has to comply with EU rules for export.
There has been a flurry of partly justified indignation regarding the fate of the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL), with a fair amount of vitriol heaped upon Badenoch. The perceived problem is a retreat from the promised “sunsetting” of around 4000 pieces of EU law. This had had been established as a default process, in order to encourage the proper and rapid assessment of these laws, in order to decide whether they should be retained, amended or scrapped.
Recognition that such an assessment is necessary is important – since amongst the acquis there are doubtless laws which we would have made ourselves and wish to retain or modify, as well as those that are unduly burdensome and should go.
Above all, there should be a recognition that all should be converted into a common law format, so that precedent and case law can be properly applied, as can the application of a goal-based approach, which in turn encourages good practice. None of this latter aspect is directly linked to sunsetting.
An example of where these precepts apply from my own experience would be in relation to the Food Hygiene Directive from the late 1980s (since modified), which was based on the U.K. Food and Drugs Act. It allowed for the provision of a precautions and diligence defence, which drives business systems to produce good outcomes and allows freedom of interpretation. I know this because at the time, as an executive in a large conglomerate which included food, I wrote it (long story).
I can also relate at first hand how government, especially Whitehall, works when tasked with deregulation, since I was seconded to Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation task force, which was led by one Michael Heseltine and which clearly had no intention of diverging from the EU, let alone deregulating.
Even in those halcyon days of the Thatcher administration, the then Department for Trade and Industry did everything possible to delay deregulation until a change of administration came along and, in the meantime, came up with hundreds of quite useless and redundant laws with which to claim that the “red tape challenge” had been met.
The DTI also managed bury a report we commissioned from Freshfields, the lawyers, that identified a key problem – the fundamental difference between EU codified law which prevents any action not permitted, and common law, under which everything is permitted unless prohibited. The Anglicisation of law was key but ignored.
I am confident that Badenoch is facing a similar situation. The Whitehall machine is on a go slow, likely to find economically useless rules to delete and kick the can down the road into 2025/26 – in the hope that a new administration will halt the process. They are being ably abetted by the Lords and byotherworldly MPs in the Commons. Given this, the realpolitik solution of focusing on a large batch of meaningful deregulation, and converting the whole body of legislation into a common law compatible format ,could herald a much more meaningful result for divergence, business and the economy.
It remains to be seen whether this urgent business produces the desired result, but it is in principle a game changer.