One of the issues that has been debated by Parliament in recent days is how will the EU laws be transferred to the British statute books as we leave the EU. Will it be Ministers or Parliament itself that gets to decide which laws are transferred and in what format. It is easy to understand the argument that Vote Leave and its supporters made, calling for all of our laws to be made by Parliament and not by an unelected Bureaucrat somewhere in Brussels. However Vote Leave were simply a campaign group, unaccountable to no one but their funders. On the other hand our MPs are the ones who enacted Article 50 knowing that in doing so they had 2 years to make the transition. Never mind the time it will take to negotiate the terms of our departure, as chaotic and haphazard as that is proving to be, the truth is that simply ensuring that as we leave the UK laws are able to perform a smooth transition is entirely within our hands, or so one would imagine when that vote was made. In a speech last Tuesday Nusrat Ghani, the MP for Wealden laid out the nature of the issue very clearly, which raises the question, why did she and so many other MPs ever vote for Article 50 to be enacted when they did, bearing in mind there was clearly no realistic plan to make this work. Nusrat states:

Leaving the European Union was never going to be easy….Ultimately, the whole point of the Bill is to ensure a clean, smooth Brexit that allows for an orderly transition from inside the EU to out. Transferring EU law to UK law is a mammoth task that requires an enormous amount of bureaucracy to complete.

This should clearly be ringing alarm bells amongst those who campaigned and voted to leave.

It is simply unfeasible for this Parliament to go through every piece of legislation affected by the EU line by line to approve its transfer into domestic law. I read recently that an individual vote on each of the 20,319 EU laws would take more than 200 days of parliamentary time, and that a debate on every page of those laws would take a similar amount of time. That simply is not feasible. The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill does a bulk copy and paste, ensuring that when we leave the EU in March 2019, our domestic legislation is not caught short. Understandably, deficiencies will arise. Those deficiencies are clearly laid out in clause 7(2), and if we are to ensure an orderly Brexit, they need cleaning up. No Member of this House believes that enough parliamentary time exists to fix all these faults.

Nusrat then goes on to explain why she believes that passing such powers onto her Political Party’s Ministers will not be like Tudor times and then states:

We are leaving the EU to bring back control to our courts and our Parliament, and clause 7 bolsters this. Ultimately, once we are out, this Parliament, elected by the British people, will be able to go through what we like and what we do not like, in our own time. 

Clearly such a process could have been applied prior to the decision to enact Article 50. Had David Davis and his team carried out a meaningful analysis as outlined above, they could then have set in motion a process to allow Parliament to go through the legislation, before voting to leave the EU. However doing so would not have been easy, as it was it took almost a year to enact Article 50. However the point of this blog is that as David Davis and Theresa May did not bother to read the 850 page analysis document which MPs were allowed to read in a closed room (and many felt was totally inadequate) what is the likelihood that our Ministers will themselves trawl through 20,319 laws? If Nusrat gets her way and persuades her 649 colleagues to give the power to Ministers to deal with the 20,319 laws, they will then do what they did with the 850 page document and ask their Civil Servants to deal with the 20,319 laws. So in other words thanks to the hard work of people like Arron Banks and my MEPs Nigel and Daniel, the European Laws which they claimed were made by Eurocrats in Brussels are now going to be adopted by Bureaucrats in Whitehall, thanks to the votes of people like Nusrat Ghani.