No. In a nutshell, every single law that goes to the Council of Ministers, which is the ultimate law-making body, does so by a majority vote of the 27 member stated behind closed doors, without even so much as a transcript and in total secrecy. Indeed, I had an exchange with the noble Lord Clarke of Nottingham on this matter when he was still in this House in 2017. He made it abundantly clear in his response to an intervention that the real legislative power of the Council of Ministers was exercised in private, going on to say,
“I used to find that the best business at the European Council was usually done over lunch”,—[Official Report, 14 November 2017; Vol. 631, c. 215.]
which is fundamentally different from the way in which we have legislated since we left the EU and in this actual
debate today. By contrast, we are conducting business today, and taking democratic decisions, by a majority of this House, which is proof in itself that it works.
In practice, in the context of the sunset arrangements in this Bill, clauses 12 to 16 provide delegated powers to restate, revoke and/or replace and update certain retained EU laws, which are secondary retained EU law and a new category of “secondary assimilated law”. Many of these powers are subject to the negative procedure, but the affirmative procedure is required where primary legislation is being amended or substantive policy change implemented. Some primary legislation is in the Bill. Where the negative procedure applies, the scrutiny system is similar to the work done by the European Statutory Instruments Committee, and it will be for the House to decide how that evolves in line with the democratic decision taken by this House today.
When the original proposals for the first withdrawal agreement Act were brought into effect, at my suggestion—I introduced a Bill on the subject—all EU law was then deemed to be UK law. But then remainers got to work and came up with the concept of retained EU law, which asserted the supremacy of the principles of EU law and decisions by the European Court. We may have left the EU, but a massive ball and chain was embedded in that Act preventing us from making our own sovereign laws on our own terms. I add, by way of parenthesis, that the Prime Minister responsible for that Act resigned—thanks to the Spartans.
Those laws had been made under sections 2 and 3 of the European Communities Act 1972. It is certainly true to say that since that date, not one single European law was ever repudiated by this House, because the provisions of that 1972 Act prevented it. We were therefore subjugated to the European Union and decisions of the European Court of Justice by our own irresponsible, voluntary abdication of the inherent and democratic procedures that evolved in this House over the best part of 400 years.
Our entry into the EU in 1972 was therefore a blind step into the void of an undemocratic and unaccountable system of government. These thousands of laws lack inherent democratic legitimacy, and must therefore be removed from and/or replaced on our statute book. The Bill also allows us to move back to the certainty implicit in the UK common-law way of doing things, as compared with the purposive interpretation of law by our judges, as laid down by the principles of EU law. Nobody can dispute that.
3 pm