“ “There was this quite big emphasis on sovereignty and regulatory freedom in the campaign and certainly amongst politicians who campaigned for Brexit, but their perception of what Brexit meant was quite different to the general public’s,” Reland said.
“If you look at public attitudes towards regulation in general, people support high standards in almost all areas.”
Bonfire of EU laws
A similar dynamic has played out in issues ranging from workers’ rights to environmental protection. Threats to turn the U.K. into an offshore anarcho-capitalist paradise — occasionally used by British negotiators to threaten their EU counterparts — have in practice gone down no better in Bristol or Birmingham than they did in Brussels.
Deregulation, for many leaders of the Brexit movement, was the point of leaving the EU — and the reason the cause has such deep roots on the Thatcherite right wing of the Tory party. Margaret Thatcher herself in 1988 complained that she had not spent a decade “throwing back the frontiers of state at home” to see them reimposed by Brussels — arguably lighting the touch-paper for modern British Euroskepticism.
But efforts to scrub the U.K. statute books of EU law have also floundered. One of the most memorable videos of Rishi Sunak’s Tory leadership campaign featured a suited man feeding piles of documents marked “EU legislation” into a shredder, alongside a pledge to “review or repeal” all EU laws within Suank’s first 100 days as prime minister.
Tory members were delighted, but the idea was swiftly abandoned in office. The justification for the U-turn? “I am not an arsonist. I'm a Conservative,” said Badenoch, putting her defense to disappointed Euroskpetic MPs last year.
“It’s never been tried before, probably for good reason: no one has ever tried to unilaterally remove a core pillar of their legal system overnight,” said Reland.
The Tory manifesto still boasts of having scrubbed thousands of laws from the statute books — but fails to add that most of the deleted regulations had long ceased to actually do anything.”
http://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-uk-british-voters-elections-2024-labour-party-keir-starmer-rishi-sunak-rachel-reeves-migration/
Fing right wingers always cause havoc.
Food for thought for US MAGA ASSHOLE SIMPLETONS who want to shred what has MADE AMERICA GREAT.
| 