There are political promises that are made knowing in advance that they will have to go through the embarrassment of not being able to fulfill them. Rishi Sunak pledged to the shrinking redoubt of eurosceptic Conservative MPs, when he was fighting for the party’s leadership, to scrap all EU laws still in force in the UK by the end of the year. After almost half a century of belonging to that club, the set of provisions from the Community acquis integrated into every day-to-day activity of the British, their companies and their institutions was simply enormous: more than 4,000 legal texts. Getting rid of all of them without replacing them with new material, approved by the UK Parliament, was crazy.
The irony of Sunak’s turn lies in the fact that he has sent to the House of Commons, to announce the decision, the politics on which eurosceptics and party hardliners have pinned their hopes for him to lead the tories in the future. The support of Kemi Badenoch, the Minister of International Trade, was essential for the current prime minister to achieve the support of that sector last October, when she competed for the leadership of the formation.
“Getting rid of EU laws shouldn’t just be a race against time. We must ensure that our laws are useful to all those who apply them”, Badenoch tried to justify the twist in an article published in the Daily Telegraph, the leading eurosceptic newspaper. The Government intends to go ahead with the process of approving the Law for the Revocation and Reform of EU Legislation (REUL, in the acronym with which it is known in English), but will limit the scope of its ambition. Badenoch was trying to point out, however, that more than 1,000 EU laws have already been removed from the British legal framework. “We will deliver on our promises to get Brexit done without abandoning the high standards required. We will not dedicate ourselves to annulling laws just for the sake of it, and we will retain those that are key to the efficient functioning of our industries and companies”, assured the minister.
The anger of the eurosceptics
The bloc of eurosceptic conservative deputies, with increasingly diminishing forces, has managed, however, to promote an urgent motion in the House of Commons on Thursday to force Badenoch to appear and offer explanations. The minister’s argument that it was a change in strategy, but not in objective, has barely managed to convince or calm the hard wing tory more furious. “What the hell are you playing at?” MP Mark Francois, the most relevant figure today of the so-called European Research Group (ERG), the eurosceptic current of the parliamentary group, has asked the minister. which, until recently, had enough power to topple or elevate prime ministers.
“The Government has just carried out a huge withdrawal of its own law, despite the fact that the text had the support of the majority of conservative parliamentarians,” Francois denounced. “Unfortunately, the prime minister has decided to shred his own promises instead of EU legislation,” said Jacob Rees-Mogg, the eccentric deputy who for a long time symbolized the most anti-EU position of the party, but who decided to tie his luck to that of Boris Johnson first, and then to that of the ill-fated Liz Truss.
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The Labor opposition, as well as the Scottish nationalists of the SNP, enjoyed the day, highlighting how the government had carried out a “total betrayal” of its promises, and how the result had been the “absolute disaster” that the formation of the left anticipated that it was going to be the management of Brexit.
“It is delicious to see how the Labor caucus and the ERG share positions, and it makes me realize that, by irritating both sides, what I do is appropriate the pragmatic terrain of the center,” Badenoch boasted during a parliamentary debate in which he has heard reproaches for his arrogant tone even from the speaker (Speaker) of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle.
Beyond these skirmishes, however, what has become clear after the government turnaround is that the time for pragmatic euroscepticism has come. Both Sunak and Badenoch have been early supporters of Brexit, but have understood that the British public no longer has an appetite for more bigotry. And the eurosceptic bank has lost the strength and capacity for rebellion that it had until recently.
The so-called Windsor Framework Agreement, the pact signed between Sunak and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to end the long conflict between London and Brussels over the Northern Ireland lace in the post-Brexit era, It was barely rejected by about twenty Conservative deputies on its way through the House of Commons, where it obtained comfortable approval. It is very foreseeable, according to the conservative sources consulted, that the same thing will happen again with the law for the revocation of EU legislation. There is no desire for new internal battles. Much less after the setback suffered by the tories last week in the municipal elections that were held throughout England.
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