‘Roast beef of the full Brexit now thin gruel’
Eurosceptics have expressed their fury at the news that the government could be set to abandon its plan to review or scrap thousands of EU law.
Business secretary Kemi Badenoch has said that the majority of the 4,000 pieces of retained EU law would remain, in a government u-turn reported by the Financial Times, with the new aim to remove 800 statutes and regulations.
The controversial Retained EU law bill would automatically revoke most retained EU law at the end of this year.
The Law Society has said the bill would have a ‘devastating’ impact on legal certainty and cause confusion for UK businesses and consumers.
Whilst the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) has warned that the bill threatens to remove vital protections on workers’ rights, including holiday pay, rest breaks and equal pay for women and men.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, who brought the post-Brexit legislation forward, took to his GBNews moggologue show last night to highlight the bill as “fundamental to the completion of Brexit”.
He went on to compare the bill to a roast dinner, asking, “are we now getting, instead of the roast beef of the full Brexit we were hoping for, with roast potatoes, Yorkshire potato and lashings of gravy, merely thin gruel.”
Perhaps jumping on the band waggon led by Dominic Raab last week, who bemoaned ‘activist’ civil servants, Rees-Mogg went on to throw blame on the civil service as the current reason for the u-turn, saying, “the problem here, is that the civil service doesn’t want to deliver”.
In reaction to the suggested change in policy, Paul Nowak, TUC general secretary, has urged the government to dump the bill, adding it wouldn’t be the first time the government has been forced to u-turn under pressure.
Nowak said: “After countless warnings from unions, business and environmental groups – the government is finally having second thoughts about its disastrous plan to rip up hard-won workers’ rights.
“But with 800 laws still being scrapped at the end of the year, ministers must now come clean on their plans and give firm commitments that they will not touch our hard-won workers’ rights.
“Unions won’t rest until we know our vital rights at work are safe. It’s time to dump this bill in its entirety.”
Hannah Davenport is trade union reporter at Left Foot Forward
(Photo credit: GBNews / Screenshot)
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