Sir Keir Starmer made every effort throughout the 2017-19 in Parliament to prevent UK leaving the EU. He has made clear however, that Labour is now reconciled to BREXIT and will not seek to reverse it. But this is rather undermined by Labour’s current actions in Parliament. At every opportunity, when a problem occurs, They put it down to our having left the EU. This week, for example, they blamed the shelves emptied of salads in our supermarkets on the decision by the British people to vote to leave the EU. As I pointed out in the Commons in response to this nonsense, perhaps we ought to have been told -before we voted – that a vote to leave was going to result in the frosts in Morocco.
The reality is that most of our salads, at this time of year, come from southern Spain and Morocco both of which had an exceptionally warm December followed by an exceptionally cold January. Consequently, the crop has been particularly disappointing. Our own domestic supplies of these commodities won’t arrive until summer because the cost of heating greenhouses is prohibitively uncompetitive.
Seeking supplies from elsewhere has had the additional complication of striking French ferry workers.
None of this, of course, has a blind thing to do with BREXIT
Perhaps even more indicative of Labour’s continuing hostility to BREXIT is its determination to thwart the Retained EU Law Bill. This Bill completes most of the Brexit agenda. There are some 4,000 pieces of EU legislation which remain on the statute book because we incorporated them into our own law as there simply wasn’t long enough to consider them individually in the time available while we were negotiating our exit. Then there was the Covid-19 pandemic, causing a legislative backlog; then the war in Ukraine seized the political agenda. Only now therefore, are we wrestling with the EU retained Law Bill. Basically, the bill empowers the Government to go through all the EU laws and, those that it does not specifically decide to keep, will automatically lapse according to the timetable set out in the Bill.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats are now sponsoring amendments in the House of Lords that will require that each of these individual legislative measures be separately debated in Parliament. It is, in effect, a wrecking amendment. It would clog-up all available parliamentary time for years.
The motive behind such an agenda seems rather obvious to me: its supporters don’t want us to differ from the EU’s regulatory regime, because to do so, would make it harder for us to re-join -which is their real objective.