May I begin by thanking the fantastic Bill team, some of whom may be listening to our proceedings this afternoon? This was an extremely difficult piece of work to pull together. The hard work that they have put in to achieve that in a timely way shows, it has to be said, the British civil service at its best. I am
sometimes quite critical of the British civil service, so it is nice to be able to put on record in Hansard my grateful thanks for the deeply impressive work that has been done.
The Bill is being enormously overinterpreted by Opposition Members, and—it has to be said, as my hon. Friend the Minister did—mainly by people who never wanted to leave the European Union anyway. I think the laws of physics are being rewritten by the opponents of Brexit, because as far as I am aware, things do not expand in black holes; that is rather the point of them. Things are sucked in, and even light is trapped by the gravity.
3.45 pm
There is a misconception on the Opposition Benches, in so many respects, when it comes to this Bill and the amendments tabled to it. The amendments themselves are deeply confused. On the one hand, there is a concern that the Bill is a great power grab; that this enormously powerful state will snatch power away from the Houses of Parliament. On the other hand, Opposition Members want the regulations to be extended. Either this is a great power grab or the regulations should be extended; it cannot be both.
The truth is that the Bill is mainly technical. What it is doing is correcting our statute book so that we no longer have laws referring to European regulations that may themselves have been repealed or amended. We currently have rules that are based on things that either are out of date or even, possibly, no longer exist. That is no basis for our statute book. It is a technical tidying-up operation that will apply to the regulations that are kept.
However, if we look at clauses 4 and 5, we see that it is also technical in terms of ensuring that our law has one base, and that the validity of, speaking loosely, UK law—obviously there is Scots law, English and Welsh law, and Northern Irish law—has its own individual base, without EU law, EU law principles or a civil code approach influencing, upsetting and confusing it. That applies both to the principle of the supremacy of EU law and the general principles of EU law, and to the ability of our courts to revisit earlier judgments so that they are based on what we can loosely call UK law. It is an extremely sensible approach.
The SNP, as so often, becomes very confused in the European debate, because it wants, and makes its case for, greater sovereignty for Scotland, until it hands it all over to the European Union. The SNP wants independence from the Westminster Parliament, to which it makes a very noble contribution: I see in his place the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), who certainly made a fine contribution as its leader here. So SNP Members make a contribution here, but they want to leave here to hand it to Brussels. That seems to me to be the definition of eccentricity, and something without a logical base.
What this Bill does is give power to the devolved authorities. They will be able to take retained EU law and do with it as they please. They can keep it, they can revoke it, they can amend it, but they cannot extend it. Why can it not be extended? That is a point that has been raised, and it is one about which people have some concern, because this is technical. This is turning the status quo into domesticated law. If people want to
make the political argument for extending laws, they have the ability to do that where it is devolved. They have the power to do it, but it is not this Bill. Likewise, in this Parliament, if we wish to extend the regulations, we have the ability to do so. That brings me to an entirely spurious point that is being made.