Brexit three years on: the reasons why MPs are slow to legislate

On Monday, I wrote about the UK’s third anniversary on becoming free of the European Union.

Admittedly, Northern Ireland is still half-in and half-out, a problematic situation that is being negotiated.

I pointed out the sclerotic pace at which MPs are legislating to take full advantage of Brexit.

On February 1, UnHerd featured an article by Richard Johnson, a Labour Party member, and Lecturer in US Politics and Policy at Queen Mary University of London: ‘Labour’s lost love for Leave’.

Richard Johnson voted to Leave in 2016 and has no regrets.

Before going into Parliament’s slow pace at reclaiming our sovereignty, he explains Labour’s changing viewpoint on belonging to the EU (emphases mine):

Back in 2016, one in three people who voted Labour at the previous year’s general election voted for Brexit. Today, polling for UnHerd shows that just 15% of Labour voters think the UK was right to leave. Of course, in those intervening years, there has been enormous churn in the Labour electorate, with sizeable defections by Labour Leavers at the last election to the Brexit Party and the Conservatives. Nonetheless, UnHerd’s polling shows that support for Brexit has dropped significantly in Labour’s historic heartlands in the North and Midlands.

In historical terms, this is a striking shift. For four decades, the Labour Party was the chief Eurosceptic party in British politics — far more so than the Conservative Party. Every Labour leader between Clement Attlee and Neil Kinnock had expressed opposition to joining (or support for leaving) the European Economic Community (EEC) at some point as a frontbench Labour MP. The first truly pro-European Labour leader was John Smith, who defied a three-line whip in 1972 to vote for the Conservatives’ European Communities Act. Pro-Europeanism was viewed as a Right-wing project — an attempt to constitutionalise capitalist principles in ways that would curtail the power of socialist governments to plan their national economies as they saw fit.

Labour’s perspective on the EU began to change in the 1980s:

In the late Eighties, Labour finally abandoned its opposition to EEC membership, though the change was driven more by a response to repeated domestic defeats than a principled embrace of the European project. The promise of a “social Europe” was regarded by many Labour MPs as a chimera, but it at least offered some alternative to Thatcherism. So the party came to accept supranational legal limits on British governments, hoping the EU could mitigate the excesses of Conservative rule.

Belonging to the EU meant that EU law applied, restricting the ability of both Conservatives and Labour to raise legislation that benefits the UK’s interests. This also affected civil servants’ work:

… this Mephistophelian deal meant placing limits on future Labour governments, too. Policy tools which had once been fundamental to previous governments’ socialist programmes — trade policy, currency management, state aid and nationalisation, and capital and labour controls — were all sacrificed in exchange for the promise of minimum labour standards and regional development funds delivered through European institutions, rather than Whitehall.

Once we were in, we were in fully. Although Johnson is writing from a Labour perspective, the following attitudes also pertain to Conservative Remainer MPs, of which there are many:

Few outwardly advocated leaving the bloc, believing it to be too difficult or simply not politically feasible …

This is where we find ourselves today, six-and-a-half years after voting to leave in the 2016 referendum.

Parliamentarians have not had to legislate much since the 1970s. Civil servants haven’t had to think about that, either. Hence the slow pace. It might require work, not only in the House of Commons but also in Whitehall:

Joining the EEC in 1972, for instance, took a variety of national powers out of the hands of the UK Government and, by extension, parliament. EU countries are constitutionally transformed from nation-states to member-states, as the Cambridge academic Chris Bickerton has explained. This means that a variety of policy instruments are removed from national governments altogether, or their implementation becomes contingent on the wishes of the European Commission or interpretations of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Perhaps more obviously, EU membership is simply not compatible with a belief in socialist planning. At its core, the Single Market is designed to limit the power of national electorates to plan their own economies. Of course, a certain degree of national economic planning is permitted within EU membership, but it is conditional. Any time a national government takes a decision that is viewed as distorting the hallowed Single Market — which must be prioritised above all else — those policies are blocked …

… European judges have struck down labour practices that they claim impose onerous restrictions on business, as in the infamous cases Laval and Viking. The former limited Swedish trade unions insisting on higher working conditions for construction workers from Latvia who operated in Sweden. The latter prevented a Finnish transport union from taking action against Viking Line for reclassifying their workers under the flag of a lower-wage EU country to ignore Finnish collective bargaining. Because these judgements are based on judicial interpretation of fundamental EU treaty rights, no legislation, either at a national level or from MEPs, can overturn them.

As such, for 50 years, the UK government has had to rely on Brussels for legislation. It is no wonder that the nanny state has grown so much, particularly over the past 25 years. What else is there to legislate upon but personal behaviours?

Johnson points out that Labour have been as negligent as the Conservatives over embracing our new freedoms:

Indeed, there are so many areas of policy where Labour ought to have spent the last few years seriously thinking about the post-Brexit opportunities. How can we use procurement better now that we are out of the Single Market? … What would a socialist trade policy look like, once protection of continental European industries and agriculture is removed from the equation?

Instead, Labour has wasted the years since Brexit almost as much as the Tories have. Labour had stood on a manifesto in the 2017 election which promised to take the UK out of the EU, Single Market, and Customs Union. That election saw the biggest increase in its vote since the 1945 General Election and the only net gain in Labour seats since 1997. A majority of the seats Labour won in England were Leave-voting seats off the Tories …

Today, though … the reality is that Labour is still not making the case for Brexit on Labour terms. Virtually every time a Labour politician speaks about Brexit, it is framed as an attempt to mitigate the damage. Labour’s underlying assumption is that Brexit has failed because the UK has diverged too much from the EU. A better Brexit is one closer to the EU. But, the reality is that the UK has not diverged enough from the limitations which EU membership placed on national economic planning.

The reason why?

For both main parties, it’s too much like work, for MPs and civil servants alike: a parlous state of affairs.