Dozens of charities, trade unions and other non-government organisations have banded together to share the work of scrutinising the small print of the Brexit process to make sure the transfer of thousands of EU rules and regulations to Westminster does not allow a power grab by Government ministers.
Seventy groups such as Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, Liberty and the Unison union will pool resources to wade through the detail of the “Great Repeal Bill” which will shift EU law into domestic British statutes.
Coordinated by the activist group Unlock Democracy, the mostly Left-leaning organisations fear that without close monitoring the Conservative Government could use the controversial bill to increase its own powers and water down various standards and protections that have been introduced by Brussels.
Introduced by Prime Minister Theresa May the day after she triggered Brexit, the repeal bill will effectively “cut and paste” relevant EU law into British law, the government claims, “to ensure a smooth transition on the day after Brexit begins”.
The repeal bill is intended to avoid disruption as the UK leaves the EU, allowing the British Parliament to subsequently amend, repeal and improve the laws where necessary.
There are more than 12,000 EU regulations in force in the UK, according to EU legal database EUR-Lex, and there are scores of Acts of Parliament which have incorporated EU directives.
“Basically, there’s European law all over the place,” said one constitutional expert. “We’re not entirely sure where all of it is or what it’s doing, so the safest thing to do is to copy and paste all of it into British law on the day Brexit happens and then try to figure out what we’ll do with it later.”
Fears of Repeal Bill
But members of the newly-formed alliance fear the repeal bill could confer “significant extra powers to ministers” to make changes to legislation without the scrutiny of all MPs, using so-called delegated powers.
Some of the more contentious parts of the repeal bill will empower ministers to set up new public bodies to take over the UK responsibilities of EU bodies, and make legal changes to implement the terms of the eventual exit deal.
Labour’s Hilary Benn, (left) the chairman of the Brexit select committee, has suggested this could amount to a “blank legislative cheque”. The Tory Government have insisted the powers will only be used to make “ technical corrections to make laws translatable” but a spokesman for the alliance said the member organisations were not prepared to give the government a free hand.
“Without safeguards to prevent these powers from being abused, Ministers would be free to dump rules and regulations they don’t like on everything from workers rights,to regulations on what you can put in baby food or clean air standards, with nothing more than the flick of a pen,” a spokesman said.
“We need to make sure that these powers are used only to bring back existing EU laws into the UK and not make big policy changes.”
Huge Challenge
Lord Judge, the former lord chief justice, warned that the sheer scale of the regulatory and legislative changes made Brexit “a legislative tsunami … the greatest challenge ever faced by our legislative processes”.
The alliance is funded by a range of charitable trusts including the Barrow Cadbury Fund, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Lloyds Bank Foundation.
Samuel Lowe, Friends of the Earth’s campaign lead, said environmental protections must not “fall between the gaps” during the legislative process. “Around 80% of our environmental protections come from the EU, and we need them brought over into UK law so that they work just like they do now,” he said.
“This isn’t ‘red tape’. They are rules that exist for a reason: to protect our beaches, air and wildlife, and nobody wants to see these threatened.”
Other groups in the alliance include the women’s rights organisation the Fawcett Society, the farming charity Sustain, environmental charities such as Greenpeace and several human rights groups.
by Bob Graham
The post Brexit: Bracing for “Tsunami” of Legal Changes appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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