1998
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A British strategy for Europe? by Charles Grant
After nearly seven years of acrimony, the UK and the EU are talking sweetly to each other. The Ukraine war reminded them how much they have in common. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen showed a willingness to compromise over the Northern Ireland Protocol, fostering good will on both sides. It also helps that Sunak and President Emmanuel Macron get on well, since friction between London and Paris had undermined the broader UK-EU relationship.
So Sunak has refused to withdraw the nonsensical Retained EU Law Bill. This would require ministers to scrap, by default, UK legislation that derives from EU law, by the end of this year, unless they decide to amend or retain it – with almost no parliamentary scrutiny. Nobody is sure how many pieces of legislation are covered by the bill, but the number might be around 4,000.
Does all this presage a profound shift in UKEU relations? The short answer is no, at least not until the governing Conservative Party undergoes the kind of radical transformation that currently seems unlikely. True, only 22 Conservative MPs voted against the ‘Windsor Framework’ (which revised the Northern Ireland Protocol). And the Democratic Unionist Party’s hostility to that revision is futile: though it may boycott the region’s executive for a while, in the long run it will have to accept the framework, since nobody is going to offer an alternative.
The civil service lacks the capacity to review so many laws so quickly. NGOs fear that many social and environmental protections will be lost, while businesses worry about an unstable regulatory environment. Furthermore, as Anton Spisak has argued, the bill may undermine parts of the Windsor Framework. Yet Sunak is pushing ahead with the bill, perhaps hoping that the House of Lords will do him a favour by insisting on major amendments (there are also reports that he may accept a six-month extension to the deadline for decisions on scrapping EU-derived rules).
Yet the Conservative Party remains profoundly eurosceptic. Sunak wants good relations with the EU but is wary of upsetting hard-line MPs in the European Research Group (ERG). The 22 opposing Windsor included three former party leaders – Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan-Smith and Liz Truss – who can make a lot of noise. A further 50 Conservatives abstained in the vote.
In another bid to placate the hard right, Sunak is prioritising the Illegal Migration Bill, which would prevent those coming to the UK in small boats from applying for asylum. His own government admits that this may well breach international law. And Sunak tolerates a home secretary who in October called for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Suella